A member of our community, @Doyle_Cook, has some experience as a private investigator. Given his experience, I emailed him a while back, asking if he would put together a list of his favorite free, low-cost, or non-gated online resources for locating a person.
He kindly put together this short list of websites:
Google will probably always be my first source of information. On this platform, I’ll start with a name and state or city and state they lived in. A useful tool here is to put asterisks around something you want to hone in on. For example,
“John Smith” Pittsburgh, PA
Pipl.com used to be a free and an awesome resource for finding people.
https://www.truepeoplesearch.com/ was also helpful, but now it’s kind of annoying to use because it has sponsors trying to vie for your attention.
WhitePages.com is a resource I use occasionally.
LinkedIn - I love this one if you can find the person you’re searching for because if they’re a user — there’s a place on there to look up contact information. Contact information may provide a phone number, email address, website, etc.
I thought it was interesting how Google (as basic as it is) was his #1 resource. It was also interesting how LinkedIn was on there, and I’ve also heard Facebook can be quite useful for finding people.
I know the next generation of search engines like Perplexity could also be useful here. I haven’t tried using it for this purpose yet, but it seems like it could be worth a try, especially with a Pro membership.
Usually, my first assumption with these things is that the real information can only be found by paying for some service like Spokeo or BeenVerified… and maybe that’s true in some cases, but it seems like more often than not, it’s more about continuing to turn over every rock and attempt every possible search until you can connect the dots.
I’m just fine! lol.