Monday, February 22, 1999

Meggy Byte

They see
can you
In the past few months, Infospace has become my favorite people finder tool. In addition to white (individual) and yellow (business) page listings for the USA and many other countries, you can do reverse lookups on Phone Numbers, Street Addresses, Email Addresses, and Area Code.
WHAT’S A REVERSE LOOKUP?
This means you can find a person’s name and address if all you know is the phone number. Or you could find someone’s name and phone number if you know just the street address. This can come in handy if you’re browsing the classifieds. Imagine this scenario...You see a car advertised in your local newspaper, and you’d like to know more about it. Just do a reverse phone number search at Infospace and you now know the name and address of the person selling the car. You could even drive by and have a look at the car, since Infospace also provides a map and driving directions.
OOOH, THAT’S TRICKY!
And here’s a little undocumented trick I stumbled into: Infospace can tell you the names of everyone on your street. Just omit the street number on the reverse address screen. When you find a person through Infospace, whether it’s via a regular name search or reverse lookup, Infospace also provides handy links to business, government offices, and a city guide for the city where the person lives.
JANE... GET ME OFF THIS CRAZY THING!
That’s handy. But some people find it scary. So if you DON’T want to be found in an online directory, use the Remove feature. At Infospace, just find yourself with a search, then click the “Update/Remove” link to change or remove your own listing. You should also visit the other popular people directories such as Four11.com or Switchboard.com and take similar action. “http://www.infospace.com” http://www.four11.com http://www.switchboard.com
It’s good to know about these alternate people finders for another reason. Even though the Infospace directory is quite extensive, and is updated four times a year, you may not find the person you’re looking for. If that’s the case, try the other sites since they all use different databases.
Hint: Don’t bother trying other phone search sites if you don’t find it at one of these. You’ll be wasting your time, since these sites get the latest info from the databases available from the three major vendors of telephone directory information in the USA. If you’re after someone outside the USA, Infospace also has listings for Canada, United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain and a page with links to other phone directories around the world. Click on “International” at the Infospace home page to get there.
I SPY?
Infospace also has links to some paid services that can help you locate missing persons, do background checks, social security number checks, and help with adoption reunions by accessing the same US public record databases used by the FBI, Law Enforcement Agencies and Private Investigators to locate people. If you want to check out these services click on “Public Records” at the Infospace home page. I haven’t used these services myself, so I can’t give a positive or negative review of how they work. See ya next week, Meggy.

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