I’ve been in this people search industry for over 3 years now and while researching, I found many free, high quality free people search engines to help you reconnect with friends, family, school friends or any other person from your past (or, in other words, find anyone for free online.) So I decided to put them in one huge list. Here they are:
Free People Search – Check if the Person is Online
1. Pipl (great for searching people around the world)
What does it do: Pipl is also one of my favorites free people search engines. They get their data from various sources and display them on one page where you can see online profiles, blog posts that person made, archives and other valuable information.
What does it do: This is a pretty new and neat people search service. You can search by name and find the email of someone. However, there’s a (nice) catch: you cannot view the full email but can always send a message to the person via their system. The best thing: unlike most of the sites here, this one is (so far) 100% free.
3. Facebook Friend Search and Friend Browser (login required)
What does it do: Facebook is free to search and also free to register (yeah, I bet you didn’t know this ). They recently introduced a new feature called “Friend Browser” (link above, you need to be logged in to access this feature) where you can easily find friends from high school, your previous workplace and so on. You can also use the standard “Friend Search” (first link above) and browse over 500 million active members.
4. KGBPeople
What does it do: I found this new and extremely useful resource several weeks ago. KGBPeople is a very robust engine for finding people and their social networking accounts, web data, pictures and so on.
5. Tweepz
What does it do: Search for people on Twitter by name, profession, religious background and many other criteria. Twitter grows every day and so the number of people registered there.
6. Spokeo
What does it do: Spokeo supports locating individuals by name and username. Unfortunately, searching by phone and email is not free (but you have many sites below which do just that!)
7. Lullar (great for reverse email lookup)
What does it do: Lullar is not well-known reverse email and username search engine. I really like their ability to do a reverse email lookup (using the 16 most popular social networking sites) and haven’t found any free website doing a better job on this.
What does it do: If you know that the person you’re searching for has an unique username you can use this tool to search by that criteria and see where is he registered.
9. TinEye
What does it do: With TinyEye you can search by PICTURE. Yeah, I’m serious. If you have a picture of a person and you want to see where that picture appears elsewhere on the web this is a great tool. They currently index 1 billion images…and this is a very small proportion of the web but the index grows rapidly every month. So use this tool only if you have a lot of pictures of the individual.
10. Yasni
What does it do: Yasni is a mind-blowing resource that you can use to find people by name. Pretty decent resource if you ask me.
Find Classmates & Workplace and Military Friends
11. Jigsaw
What does it to: Do you know where the person you’re looking for was/is currently working at? In that case, you can use Jigsaw (which is probably the biggest business directory) to search by company and find that person’s phone number.
12. Alumni.net
What does it do: Alumni provides a list of alumni websites all over the world to help find your classmates. It is the biggest website on the internet of its kind.
13. Classmates
What does it do: Classmates is a big people search engine to help you find your friends from college, workplace and military.
14. ZoomInfo
What does it do: Zoominfo will search for large range of employees for different companies. Use this site to find professionals and workplace friends.
Find People using White Pages Directories
15. White Pages
What does it do: White Pages is the most popular directory to search for a person’s addresses and phone numbers. You can also do a reverse phone and address search so if you know the address or the phone, you can easily find the name.
16. AnyWho
What does it do: I’ve found AnyWho, although it has a smaller database than WhitePages, it containts some information about people that White Pages does not currently have. So I recommend you use them in a combination.
17. ZabaSearch
What does it do: This is a quite different website than the previous two. Here you can also find addresses and phone numbers like in Anywho and Whitepages. Sometimes they display different data than White Pages, but that is not often.
Find Maiden Names and Relatives
18. PeopleFinders.ws
What does it do: If you go on PeopleFinders.ws and start searching, you’ll find the potential relatives of the person you’re looking for and their approximate age. You will also see the possible roommates/associates. Powerful stuff.
19. US Search
What does it do: This is a website for background check and it is not free. However there are some excellent free functions they provide and that’s why I put it in the list. If you type a person’s name, in the results you’ll see previous names of the person. Often if you’re looking for a married female you can find her maiden name this way (or if you don’t know her married but know the maiden name.) You will also see previous locations where that person lived. Really great addition to 123people.
Find People using Public Records
What does it do: If you scroll down below you’ll see a list of public records by state. There you have thousands of websites that provide free public records.
21. Infobel
What does it do: Infobel is by far the world’s largest directory of white pages resources. Use it for international people search.
22. Ancestry – Social Security Death Index
What does it do: Search people by their social security number and see if they’re still alive. Or you can use this search engine to find deceased people and do further research.
What does it do: This is the only free criminal records engine. You can search for a person and see if he has a criminal record.
Find People Using General Search Engines
What does it do: You can use Google to enter a phone number (this is only for United States) and it will give you the owner of that number. You can also search for a person using Google. Just make sure you surround the first and last name in quotes. So, write “John Smith” instead of John Smith.
What does it do: Yahoo uses their search engine to find people for you. It is a great resource.
So those are the top 25 free people search engines to find anyone no matter where they’re from. Which is the best? There’s no best engine here. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. So the more you use, the bigger the chances are you’re going to find the person you’re looking for. Good luck!
