4.1. White Pages, Yellow Pages When you're at your computer, the Web can be faster than a telephone book. Plus, you can search the entire country, not just the area in the book the phone company dumps on your porch once a year. To look someone up in an online directory, you need to know at least the person's last name, plus any other information you can supply, like first name , city, and state. For very common surnames, this additional information gets you more accurate results. Here are the most popular people-finder sites: -
Switchboard.com . Billing itself as Your Digital Directory, Switchboard.com (www.switchboard.com) lets you search for phone numbers and addresses. You can also do a reverse lookup on the address if you know the phone number, look up area codes, and get maps and directions between two addresses.
Tip: Some sites let you remove your own entry from their listings. If seeing yourself listed in one of these sites gives you the creeps, look for a " phone book removal" link.
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Yahoo People Search . This site (http://people.yahoo.com) helps you try to find a person's email address, as well as the usual phone number and postal address. Since no one's invented a completely comprehensive or accurate email directory yet, though, don't count on getting an up-to-date, working email address this way. But at least it's a start. -
Google . Along with all the other tricks up its sleeve, Google has its own phone book. You can get to it right from the regular search box at www.google.com. Simply type the person's name (and city and state if you know them)for example, douglas smith 10024 or timothy ettlinger chagrin falls , oh and hit Enter. Google lists all matching names on your results page, complete with links to maps of the address. If you know the phone number but not the address, you can also do a reverse lookup: type the full phone number with area code into the box and click Search to get the address listing. -
WhoWhere . Powered by Verizon's SuperPages directory, WhoWhere (http://whowhere.lycos.com) offers searchable White Pages, reverse lookup, and its own email address directory.
Note: When you go digging for people on some of these sites, you may see offers to sell you all kinds of data on the person, from criminal background checks to high school information. Most of this data's freely available in public records, so selling it online is crass capitalism . Not to mention disturbingly Orwellian.
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