Searching for People by Phone Number

Once Google has captured name, address, and phone number information in the PhoneBook, it's an easy enough task to search that information in a variety of ways. One such approach is to do a reverse phone number lookup, where you enter a phone number and Google tells you who the number belongs to.

Tip

If you'd rather not have your phone number available for everyone on the Web to Google, you can have your phone information removed from Google's database by following the instructions at www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html.

To conduct a reverse phone number search, all you have to do is enter the full phone number, including area code, into the standard Google search box, as shown in Figure 4.5. You can enter all 10 numbers in a row, without hyphens (like this: 1234567890), or use the standard hyphenated form (like this: 123-456-7890); Google accepts either method. When you click the Search button, Google displays a single matching PhoneBook result, as shown in Figure 4.6.

Figure 4.5. Searching to see who belongs to a specific phone number.

Figure 4.6. The very specific result of a reverse phone number lookup query.

Notice that when you search for a phone number, you get the PhoneBook result plus Google's standard web search results. To limit your search to the PhoneBook only, use Google's phonebook: operator. Just enter the operator followed by the phone number, like this: phonebook:123-456-7890. (Alternatively, you can limit your search to the residential PhoneBook by using the rphonebook: operator.) The page that's returned by this method is shown in Figure 4.7.

Figure 4.7. The results of a reverse phone number lookup.

By the way, you can also use the phonebook: and rphonebook: operators to search for phone numbers by a person's name, address, or state, although the PhoneBook results are identical to entering the same information in the standard search box. What's different is that you get only PhoneBook results, as shown in Figure 4.8, without any web search results.

Figure 4.8. The results of a standard phone number search using the phonebook: operator.