People to People search

How often have you or someone you know have done an internet search for an old classmate, relative or a friend you lost contact with over the years? Anyone who has written an article, spoken in public, committed a crime or even submitted to a magazine is likely to be in some public database on the internet. It should be no surprise then that people related search engines came about to fill the need for people looking for people. Sure, anyone can do a Google search to find a person but usually what you will get is something related to what they are doing, what they have done, what they are involved with or maybe an email address or two. Ex. John Smith-website designer, books by John Smith, art works by John Smith. Most of the time you will not find anything personal like phone numbers, addresses, background checks, criminal checks and the like. People search engines or as they are sometimes called White Pages, specialize in finding people in not just one city but anywhere in the United states.
Before dealing with people search sites it is a good idea to do a simple Google or Yahoo search on the site you are considering. Just type the site name in the search box (without http://www) and add the word reviews or complaints at the end and you will see if there any negative remarks for that site. From there you can make your own informed opinion whether to trust the people search website or not. There is something else to be aware of, and that's many people search sites will give you just basic information for FREE like name, address or phone. If that's all your after fine but if you are doing a background check, criminal check or anything of that nature they will likely charge you a small fee for the extra service. I have looked at a lot of sites and in the end they charge for this service.
However, there are professional sites that have reasonable pricing for what they offer. Note that these represent a small part of these sites and not meant to cover all services they provide. These
are just a few of the ever growing of people related search sites.
(right from about us page) "www.Peoplefinder.com has indexed billions of publicly available records and provides a simple format to search for up to 80% of people currently residing in United States." They offer background checks, Public Records Search, Reverse Cell Phone Lookup, Businesses Search and more.
www.intelius.com can search by name and get information about the persons past and present locations and possible relatives. Also offers background checks, reverse phone lookup, property and neighborhood information, employee screening, tenant screening and much more.
www.usa-people-search.com is good for property checks, background checks, criminal records,
bankruptcies, tax liens, civil judgments and lots more.
The list can go on and as you can see some sites can offer similar searches and others have a few added offers so your search will depend on what you want to find at the time.
People can be there own online detective to a point because the general public has access to a
great deal of public record documents. While this is true, in many cases like kidnaping, 'looking for the paper trail' left by a suspect or investigating a fire (arson), blood and bones detectives are still useful and in these cases necessary to resolve the case. Also detectives have in there favor that they are given id numbers from the state that give them special privileges in getting access to private data online or offline.
People Searches on Google and Yahoo account for 30% of all Internet searches and that's a big part of the pie when you consider all the searches done in a day. To put this in prospective google searches are at around 200 million a day, there nearest rival is yahoo. I believe people searches engines will be with us for a long time to come (probably forever) and because of all the information available at our fingertips it is becoming more entrenched in our lives everyday.

Robert Hanania, in his continuing pursuit of sharing knowledge and useful general information has written several articles on various subjects. http://www.robertsapexsearch.com/