PEOPLE FINDERS
Dozens of search engines exist to give you first clues on backgrounding
individuals. This is not a comprehensive list. Just ones I've found useful
in finding people online. The best test for most search engines is to
put your own name in and see what turns up. Try this and see what it turns
up. Microsoft Explorer and Netscape offer a People" icon that provides
various searches for addresses, phone numbers or email addresses of people
and companies.
Special thanks to Nora Paul, of the Poynter Institute, who is the trainer's
trainer. She is the best in the business, a great inspiration and these
pages are structured directly following her teaching techniques. Also
Carole Lane, author of Pemberton Press's "Naked in Cyberspace"
was a great help in locating many of the links on these pages.
TOP TOOLS: (Many of these tools serve more than one role.) --I've listed
them more than once, if they are the best tool for the category.
Suggestion: Test your own phone number in each tool to see which ones
are reliable. If you have an unlisted phone number, check it out also,
then test someone who you know is listed
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PHONE FINDERS: |
ANYWHO
www.anywho.com |
This site, from AT&T is very thorough and easy to
use. One of the best. It also includes an excellent reverse directory
and has a unique feature, allowing you to look up anyone with a listed
phone number on a specified block anywhere in the country.
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SWITCHBOARD
www.switchboard.com
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This is another deep phone directory with a good email finder etc,
maps and a bunch of other tools.
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INFOSPACE
www.infospace.com
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Like many of the other phone books, Infospace offers maps, reverse
directories and other tools. But it is partcularly good for government
listings (from its partnership with the Carroll's Directories), and
also is excellent for finding numbers in Canada and the UK. The site
also has a very useful mapping tool for the geographically impaired
(like me) telling you to take a right, instead of go northwest.
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WHOWHERE
www.whowhere.com
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This Lycos-owned phone book also offers a powerful e-mail address finder
that works in German, Spanish and English. It also has some good business
finding resources.
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THE ULTIMATE WHITE PAGES
www.theultimates.com/white |
What makes this resource so valuable is that they are like a meta-site,
combining many of the previously mentioned phone finders into one centralized
common interface. This site also has a great reverse directory from
the folks at PC411.
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555-1212
www.555-1212.com |
This phone finder has really improved itself and become one of the
best. It has a series of excellent reserve directories and also has
international phone books for 10 countries. Seems to have co-branding
deals with Infospace.
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TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES ON THE WEB
www.teldir.com |
This is a great tool for finding telephone directories for countries
other than the U.S.
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EMAIL FINDERS and
DOMAIN NAME LOCATORS: |
YAHOO
people.yahoo.com |
This is also a good phone book, but a stellar email address finder.
It used to be called four11.com, but the folks at Yahoo bought it and
added new options because of the alliance.
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INTERNET ADDRESS FINDER
www.iaf.net
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One of the early email locators, Internet Address Finder
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INFOSPACE
infospace.com |
Like many of the other phone books, Infospace offers maps, reverse
directories and other tools. But it is partcularly good for government
listings (from its partnership with the Carroll's Directories), and
also is excellent for finding numbers in Canada and the UK. The site
also has a very useful mapping tool for the geographically impaired
(like me) telling you to take a right, instead of go northwest.
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411 LOCATE
www.411Locate.com
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Locate a Web site or e-mail address by a phone number, name, company
name, or keywords lookup.
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FIND ME-MAIL
www.findmemail.com/Search.htm |
Excellent service which allows you to register when you change email
addresses so that anyone who may be looking for your new email address
can find it by entering your old one. The site also seems to have a
good many safeguards in place to avoid spammers using the service. Free.
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ESP EMAIL SEARCH PROGRAM
esp.co.uk |
WORLD EMAIL DIRECTORY
worldemail.com/wede4a.shtml |
A good place to find international email addresses --especially from
France, Italy, Spain and Denmark .
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WHOWHERE EMAIL FINDER
www.whowhere.lycos.com |
This Lycos-owned phone book also offers a powerful e-mail address finder
that works in German, Spanish and English. It also has some good business
finding resources.
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BIGFOOT
www.bigfoot.com |
A huge database of white page numbers and email addresses. Will only
find ones it has already registered.
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REVERSE DIRECTORIES: |
ANYWHO
www.anywho.com/telq.html |
Find people & business, provides info and map
(Use ###-###-#### format).
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POPULUS
populus.net |
Allows to search by Email, personal interest, college or university
and birth date (but only if you have registered). Also points out famous
people's birthdays.
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YELLOW PAGES: |
BIGBOOK
www.bigbook.com |
Personal favorite yellow pages because you can sort it easily and find
specific things like the local pizza store or movie theatre.
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BIG YELLOW
www.bigyellow.com |
This site allows you to search by category and nearby location, like
Big book does.
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INFOSPACE
www.infospace.com |
Like many of the other phone books, Infospace offers maps, reverse
directories and other tools. But it is partcularly good for government
listings (from its partnership with the Carroll's Directories), and
also is excellent for finding numbers in Canada and the UK. The site
also has a very useful mapping tool for the geographically impaired
(like me) telling you to take a right, instead of go northwest.
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INFOUSA
adp.infousa.com |
One of the largest business phone company, it also has an excellent
reverse directory.
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INTERNATIONAL
YELLOW PAGES: |
WORLD PAGES HTTP
www.worldpages.com/bus/ |
This is a great phone book for international business.
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INFOBEL
www.infobel.be/infobel.infobelworld.html |
This is the best international yellow pages online.
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CHATTING SEARCHER: |
ICQ SEARCH TOOL
www.icq.com |
Locate ICQ Users (Enter person's name, e-mail address, or ICQ nickname)
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LEGAL: |
MARTINDALE-HUBBELL LAWYER LOCATOR
www.martindale.com/maps/..locator/home.html |
This well-established legal publication put up a searchable lawyer
directory including bios and affiliations
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WEST LEGAL DIRECTORY
www.wld.com |
West, a major information-gathering company also has a strong legal
division, and this is their lawyer directory.
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DOCTORS: |
A.M.A. PHYSICIAN SELECT
www.ama-assn.org/aps/mahg.htm
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This gives you the American Medical Association's Physician Select
listing of licensed doctors. Forf their addresses and credentials, click
on AMA Health Insight.
But be aware that there is no free way to check out if doctors have
been sued for malpractice.
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COLLEGE ALUMNI: |
PLANET ALUMNI
www.planetalumni.com |
Search for classmates, alumni and reunion information. But you must
register.
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WORLD ALUMNI NET
www.infophil.com/World/Alumni
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This is a good international alumni finder
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CLASSMATES.COM
www.classmates.com/index.tf |
Search over 1 million alumni listings from 30,000 schools (Must pre-register
to get FREE ID/password)
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COLLEGE and UNIVERSITY
WEBSITE LINKS: |
M.I.T.
www.mit.edu |
From the MIT main site, you can access Christina DeMellos alphabetical
listings of more than 3000 colleges and universities. Be aware that
navigating this site is difficult, however.
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SEARCHING FOR PEOPLE'S HOME PAGES: |
AHOY
ahoy.cs.washington.edu:6060
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FAMILY FINDERS: |
FAMILYTREEMAKER.COM
www.familytreemaker.com |
ANCESTORY.COM
www.ancestry.com
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AREA CODE FINDERS: |
555-1212
www.555-1212.com |
This phone finder has really improved itself and become one of the
best. It has a series of excellent reserve directories and also has
international phone books for 10 countries. Seems to have co-branding
deals with Infospace.
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NATIONAL TELEPHONE & COMMUNICATIONS TELE-LOCATOR
www.natltele.com/byphone.html |
You can put in an area code and prefix and it will tell you the city
and state. You can also put in a state and it will list the area codes
and prefixes. That site is www.natltele.com/bystate.html
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ZIP CODE FINDER: |
UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE
www.usps.gov/ncsc/lookups/lookups.htm |
US Postal Service lists excellent lookup service.
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VERIFYING ADDRESS FINDER: |
CEDAR NATIONAL ADDRESS SERVER
www.cedar.buffalo.edu/adserv.html |
This national address server, from the Cedar (Center of Excellence
for Document Analysis and Recognition) Research Group of Buffalo, NY,
works this way. If you provide a valid U.S. postal address, the website
returns a proper address format along with the ZIP+4 code.
You can retrieve a Postscript or a GIF file of the address for printing,
with a barcode!
You can also view a street map of the address.
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EXPERT FINDERS: |
FACSNET
facsnet.org/sources_online/main.htm |
This list of valuable sources is excellent and developed by Randy Reddick
and the folks at Foundation for American Communications.
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READY REFERENCE
TOOLS: |
These are the quickie reference materials that librarians always used
to pull off their shelf whenever people asked them tough questions. Things
like almanacs, encyclopedias, dictionaries, a thesaurus and quotations
sources.
Now
many of these tools are available on the web. There are virtual libraries
on the Internet --many of them. But few libraries put full text online.
Here are a handful of the best reference materials online --ones I tend
to use in a pinch. This list is far from comprehensive, just the ones
I regularly find myself using.
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INFORMATION PLEASE ALMANAC
www.infoplease.com |
The entire contents of the Information Please Almanac is now online,
plus a biography database, a dictionary and the Columbia Encyclopedia.
All easily searchable, together or separate. A valuable site.
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INTERNET PUBLIC LIBRARY READY REFERENCE COLLECTION
ipl.si.umich.edu/ref/RR |
This is like a real reading room and a very well organized reference
center.
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BRITANNICA
britannica.com |
Actually this is a subject directory, but it is based on the excellent
Encyclopedia Britannica books and is a great place to start for ready
reference materials.
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ENCYCLOPEDIA.COM
encyclopedia.com |
Based on the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, this is an excellent
reference site with thousands of free quick useful articles on assorted
topics.
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RESEARCH-IT!
www.itools.com/research-it |
A good collection of useful reference materials.
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CIA WORLD FACTBOOK
www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html
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The CIA's thorough country-by-country index with details on governments,
geography and demographics of the different countries and regions.
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WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY
humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/webster.form.html |
This site is not pretty, but very useful. A searchable dictionary online.
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ROGET'S THESAURUS
www.lightlink.com/bobp/wedt |
A searchable thesaurus
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WWWEBSTER DICTIONARY
www.m-w.com/netdict.htm |
A version of the Webster's Collegiate edition, 1993 version with more
than 160,000 entries.
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BARTLETT'S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
www.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett |
This site has a 1901 bartlett's quotations book in its entirety. Great
for older quotes like the bible.
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YAHOO QUOTES
www.yahoo.com/reference/quotations |
This is an excellent collection of materials where quotations can be
found. It's got a lot of stuff there, but some of it is excellent and
some of it is totally useless. Like with many yahoo lists, you have
to be arbiter. Still, all in all, a good starting place for looking
for quotations.
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ASKA+ LOCATOR
www.vrd.org/locator |
This is one of a growing number of online question answering services
(See search engines list)
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PRICE'S LIST OF LISTS
gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/listof.htm
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Gary Price of George Washington University has compiled an excellent
directory of "best of" lists available on the web. It is arranged
by category and is loaded with interesting information on a wide range
of topics.
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FUGITIVE FACT FILE
www.hennepin.lib.mn.us/catalog/fff_public.html
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This is a great site for hard to find information on thousands of topics.
It's maintained by the Hennepin County Library staff in Minnesota. Many
libriaries keep elusive information files for obscure references, but
this is one of the few you can find online. It is Minnesota heavy, naturally,
but there's a lot of other stuff there.
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STUMPERS LIST
www.cuis.edu/~stumpers/ |
So you are completely stumped. Can't find it, Have tried everything
and still baffled. This is a list-serve discussion group by librarians.
What is available online is the archive of the many questions that these
folks have answered. It is a superb collection of information and it
still uses the old gopher system (That's pre-web stuff for those who
don't remember pre 1994).
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CALENDAR ZONE
www.calendarzone.com |
This is a directory of all kinds of calendar-related resources on the
Net. It is excellent.
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OTHER VALUABLE
CALCULATORS & USEFUL TOOLS: |
For a great collection of these, see the Poynter Institute's Nora Paul's
list of cool calculators www.poynter.org/research/nr/nr_calc.htm
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CONVERT IT
microimg.com/science |
This is a good collection of conversion tables for calculating mathematical
equivalents.
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HOW FAR IS IT?
www.indo.com/distance |
This site uses the fascinating University of Michigan Geographic Name
Service, which finds the longitude and latitude of two places, calculates
the distance, tells you the details and also provides a map. A cool
site.
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DRIVING DISTANCE BETWEEN CITIES
pw2.netcom.com/~sodapop2/popdd.html |
A terriific calculator of the distances between two major cities.
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POPULATION CALCULATOR
tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer |
The US Census site provides a really useful Gazeteer, which lets you
plug in a city name and it gives you the population and other demographic
information.
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STATE INCOME TAX CALCULATOR
www.best.com/~ftmexpat/html/taxsites/se-state.html |
Select the state you want and get all the information about that state's
tax rates.
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POPNET
www.popnet.org |
A comprehensive directory of population-related Web sites, searchable
by topic or keyword, by organization. This is an extensive site covering
all kinds of resources produced by the Population Reference Bureau with
funding assistance from the US Agency for International Development.
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AMERICAN FACTFINDER
factfinder.census.gov/java_prod/dads.ui.homePage.HomePage |
The Census Bureau's newest system, provides useful facts and information
about your community, the local economy and local society. It searches
and pulls information from the huge Census database and allows you to
create table, reports or maps. It's pretty easy to use, but you want
to spend some time learning how so you can do it under tight deadline.
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FREQUENTLY REQUESTED TABLES
www.census.gov/statab/www/freq.html |
Another great resource from the Census Department. This compilation
from the Statistical Abstract includes all kinds of valuable resources
from the Consumer Price Index to household pet ownership statistics.
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