How to Find People Online

If you’re trying to find someone’s information, e.g. their full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, pictures, social media accounts, and arrest records, there are a lot of tools you can use. Here are some tips for tracking down anyone online.

1. Google

We all leave out digital footprints when we use the internet – our social media profiles, pictures we’ve posted, and words we’ve shared on the internet. And a powerful tool like Google can easily pick up the information when we search with the right keywords.

Step 1: Jot down everything you know about them

Jotting down a list of all the information you already have about the person can be of great help before you begin your search:

Name (including any other names they have used)
Date of birth or age
Approximate location
Associates, including their partner, friends, and relatives
Occupation
Company they work for
High schools or colleges they went to
Property or vehicle ownership
Social media username
Any criminal convictions

Step 2: Plug everything you know into Google

Now you have your list of keywords, just open up Google and type in everything you know about the person as your keyword; for example, “John Doe Los Angeles Teacher”. Combining all the information you know about the person might help you narrow down your search results, and if the person has a combination of these things listed on their social media profile, Google might be able to pick up the page for you.

During your searches, another tip is to put quotation marks around the person’s full name – this tells Google to only look for exact matches and filter out vague ones. For example, type “John Doe” when you’re looking for information related to someone named John Doe.

2. Reverse Image Lookup

Many people recycle social media profile pictures. So you can just grab their profile picture from their Facebook or Instagram account and plug it into a reverse image lookup tool which will scan the image and find the website that has the same photo listed on. This could lead you to the person’s social media profile page or online posts.

The best reverse image lookup tools we’ve testes are:

Since most people aren’t very creative when it comes to mixing up usernames or passwords, if you know their username on a certain platform (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter), chances are they might use it on other sites as well.

You can start by searching the username you have on Google or other search engines like Bing, or Duckduckgo to see if they can pick up any profiles or a personal blog under the same username. Next, you might want to check social networking sites individually because most search tools that cover social media focus on larger sites, and may not bring up results from the smaller ones.

If you’ve connected to the person’s friends, business acquaintances, or relatives on any social media, you might also want to go through their following list to see if you can find the person’s profile page from there.

4. Public Records

You can also find someone’s information through public records. Marriage and divorce records are usually at the county or state level; death records are often at the website of the local secretary of state; immigration records are at the National Archives website and various immigration portals, and criminal or civil court records are at the district or county archives.

You can go to USA.gov to find the state and federal agency databases. Just make sure you visit the official website of the state, the federal government, or the court that is relevant to your background check.

5. People Search Engine

People search engines are specialized tools that find only people-related information from contact details to work history, online profiles, and even criminal records. If you wish to get all the information on a person in one place, go with a people search engine. Here are 5 people search tools to start you off:

One thing to remember when using these tools is that the information they provide is collected from public records – which means you probably can get all the information by yourself with a common search engine like Google, but it takes time and requires some searching skills.

If you feel like digging through the information by yourself and you don’t feel like paying – as people search engines require payment to get detailed information, try the free methods we’ve covered previously.