How to Find Anyone Online for Free
We live in the most interconnected time in history. We can collaborate with people who live thousands of miles away, visit places virtually from the comfort of our homes, and we can – with varying results – express our every thought to the world.
And yet, in a sense, we are more isolated than ever. It’s getting harder to find people simply because of the sheer size of our modern networks. It’s one thing to find someone who still lives in your area, but the task can be quite difficult the wider you have to look.
But sometimes you need to find someone, and the good news is that most of us have a digital presence. Whether it’s idle curiosity about how an old friend is doing, or about a client or business associate whose details you’ve lost, we all need to find someone sometimes, and just typing a name into a search engine doesn’t always work.
As always, there are services that will take your money in exchange for finding information about people, but in most cases this is not necessary if you are willing to put in a little effort. The first step is to piece together the information you already have about the subject. For each solution on this list, the more information you provide, the narrower and more effective your search results will be. Full name, age, and any information about where you live (even just knowing the country, state, or province is helpful) will give you much more targeted results. Age is often the most useful, as it can immediately eliminate a lot of false hits. Once you’ve done that, here’s how you can find someone online for free.
First, a note about the ethical search for people.
These free resources should help you connect with someone you think would like to be found. If you’ve exhausted these tools and still haven’t found the object, consider the possibility that they don’t want you to find them and leave them alone. And if you don’t want to be found yourself, consider a service like DeleteMe , which can help erase your digital footprint from the internet.
White pages still exist
White page sites have been around for almost as long as the Internet itself. If you’ve ever searched for someone online, you’ve probably tried one or two, and they’re all basically the same: you enter someone’s name and some other information, and the service returns a list of possible matches. You then invariably end up in a sales funnel as the site promises a detailed “background report” in exchange for cold hard cash.
However, these sites can be very helpful. Whitepages.com , for example, will show you a list of current and past addresses, possible relatives, approximate ages, and even some phone numbers for free. This is pretty sparse information, but often it’s all you need to get in touch or find a piece of data that you can use in one of the other services we’ll discuss here.
TruePeopleSearch is a similar site that offers much of the same information for free; comparing the results of each one might give you what you need.
You can request public records
Nearly all state and local governments have online tools to request public records. As you can guess from the name, these are records that are legally available to anyone who makes a formal request. While some municipalities may still require you to come to a physical office to complete the required forms, most have online portals for this (for example, New York State has an online Freedom of Information Act form ). While the local government may charge a fee, this often depends on the specific records you request.
What can be learned from public records? This also varies depending on your location, but in general, marriage certificates, birth and death records, court and criminal records, and property and tax records should be available. Keep in mind that even with the Internet, accessing these records can be challenging as they are often stored in separate databases and each request requires a new form to fill out. But if you’re willing to put in the time, you can get tons of information about someone for free.
Track their social media presence
Almost everyone has a social media footprint these days, so looking up someone’s social media should be one of the first things you do when trying to track someone down. By triangulating Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram profiles, you can usually figure out where someone is and how to contact them. And LinkedIn is the obvious way to connect professionally with someone.
One way is to Google everything you know about the person (name, age, location, etc.) and add a “site:” tag. For example, you can search “John Smith” “Reno” site:Facebook.com to see all of John Smith’s profiles that mention Reno, Nevada. Alternatively, a site like Social Searcher will search across a wide range of social media platforms at once.
Perform a reverse image search
Despite the obvious lies of Star Trek and its voice-controlled computers, research on the Internet today is still largely text-based. But this does not allow us to see a very powerful tool: reverse image search. If all you want is a photo of someone (say, from a social network account), you can try a reverse lookup to see where else the image lives, which in turn can give you some clues about how to contact the person.
Google already offers this: go to images.google.com and click on the little camera icon (“search by image”). Then paste the image’s URL, upload it from your hard drive, or drag and drop from your desktop or another browser window. Google will then show you other places where the image is located.
Alternatively, you can try a site like TinEye , which does the same thing but offers a slightly more focused list of results. The accuracy or usefulness of these searches will largely depend on whether your photo has been used by the person you are trying to find.
Conduct a prisoner search
If you’re using the internet to find someone, you probably don’t know much about them – at least you obviously don’t know them well enough to contact them easily. So consider the possibility that the reason you can’t find them is because they’re in jail.
The good news is that most state and federal prison systems allow you to search for inmates online for free, and some even allow you to send messages to inmates. However, in many states, correspondence with a prisoner costs money and may require a subscription to a service such as JPay (which can also be used to find a prisoner).