Looking for a free people search?
I’ve got to be honest, the last thing on my mind was putting a blog up! But I’ve been so busy running people searches on my old classmates that I thought I just had to share some updates!
My people search project started out late last year when I received a notice of my upcoming high school reunion out of the blue. I had moved many time across the county since high school, and I was truly stunned to see that I could be so easily located. I contacted the people locator company that my high school used and a very nice rep told me that they use the same databases available to the public to find people and locate street and mailing addresses.
So I checked into some of the free people search offers (most unfortunately are worthless) found on the web, asked hundreds of questions and tested dozens of products. First, let me say that there are countless “free people search” sites advertising no-cost people search services. The only ones that I have found to be remotely useful are all powered by the three largest search engines:
Google People Search, Yahoo People Search, and MSN People Search are all a good place to begin your quest for free.
Using the best fee-based people search databases (like the one’s used by the people locator service hired by my high school), here are some rough stats I put together as reference to give you a real-world idea of what to expect:
- If you only have a person’s first and last name, your chances of locating his/her current address is @ 65% (+/- 10% - if the name is very common, your people search odds drop to @ 55%, if the name is uncommon, a people locate search jumps to @ 75% chance of success.
- If you also have the person’s middle initial, add 5% to the stats above.
- If you also have a former address that is less than seven (7) years old, add another 5%.
- If you have the person’s SSN (social security number), then your chances of finding a current street address from a people search soar to almost 95%, regardless of uniqueness of the last name, etc.
* well, sometimes!!
Add comment May 20th, 2009