Searching for someone? – a missing brother, an old school friend or a collegue who lives halfway across the world but you are not exactly sure where. I am certain you have read up a bit about people finders i.e. how helpful they can be in helping you find the person you are looking for. And of course you know about search engines – in fact chances are you found this page through a search engine.

Read on to learn about how to find people free online

Now let me provide some insights into these finder tools. I will compare the two by providing key information that you can use in your quest to find someone free.

A number of search engines have special tools that you can use to find people with but only a handful of people are fully aware of this search engine capability. Here is an example, Google offeres 3 operators that you can use i.e. bphonebook: for business, rphonebook: for residential listings and phonebook: used to search all phone listings. This is based on Google’s large database.

Having said that, let me point out that there are obviously some limitations to search engines in terms of people finder capabilities in comparison with the actual people finders.

Some superior options include people finders. These have large databases or indexes on people’s identities – depending on which one it is some reach the whole world and some are regional but nevertheless deliver within the market in which they are focused on. These avail differing information for United States citizens, such as addresses (both current and past), birth yeards, phone numbers and more.

The good thing with these is that they simply provide the exact information searched for instead of a list of results like those provided by search engines.

I should mention that there are two types of people finders i.e. paid and non-paid. while search engines are free to use there are those finders that will charge you a certain fee for looking through their databases. Usually the ones that charge you gather data from the individuals themselves and update frequently whereas the free services simply use publicly available information to put together an index or database.

Most people finders are surrounded by privacy issues for example, Zabasearch is one such company that has faced some criticism, other than that they are effective. Yes there are laws that protect people’s privacy and you should be careful not to break them – an example is The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This is one act you should take serious note of if you want to find someone free online i.e. make sure you don’t break it.

My point is, yes search engines and people finders can help you find the person you are looking for but you need to take the law into consideration – after all you do not want to be found on the wrong side of the law.