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

 

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.

SWITCHBOARD
www.switchboard.com

This is another deep phone directory with a good email finder etc, maps and a bunch of other tools.

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.

WHOWHERE
www.whowhere.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.

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.

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.

TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES ON THE WEB
www.teldir.com

This is a great tool for finding telephone directories for countries other than the U.S.

 

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.

INTERNET ADDRESS FINDER
www.iaf.net

One of the early email locators, Internet Address Finder

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.

411 LOCATE
www.411Locate.com

Locate a Web site or e-mail address by a phone number, name, company name, or keywords lookup.

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.

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 .

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.

BIGFOOT
www.bigfoot.com

A huge database of white page numbers and email addresses. Will only find ones it has already registered.

 

REVERSE DIRECTORIES:
ANYWHO
www.anywho.com/telq.html

Find people & business, provides info and map
(Use ###-###-#### format).

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.

 

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.

BIG YELLOW
www.bigyellow.com

This site allows you to search by category and nearby location, like Big book does.

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.

INFOUSA
adp.infousa.com

One of the largest business phone company, it also has an excellent reverse directory.

 

INTERNATIONAL YELLOW PAGES:
WORLD PAGES HTTP
www.worldpages.com/bus/

This is a great phone book for international business.

INFOBEL
www.infobel.be/infobel.infobelworld.html

This is the best international yellow pages online.

 

CHATTING SEARCHER:
ICQ SEARCH TOOL
www.icq.com

Locate ICQ Users (Enter person's name, e-mail address, or ICQ nickname)

 

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

WEST LEGAL DIRECTORY
www.wld.com

West, a major information-gathering company also has a strong legal division, and this is their lawyer directory.

 

DOCTORS:
A.M.A. PHYSICIAN SELECT
www.ama-assn.org/aps/mahg.htm

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.

 

COLLEGE ALUMNI:
PLANET ALUMNI
www.planetalumni.com

Search for classmates, alumni and reunion information. But you must register.

WORLD ALUMNI NET
www.infophil.com/World/Alumni

This is a good international alumni finder

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)

 

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.

 

SEARCHING FOR PEOPLE'S HOME PAGES:

AHOY
ahoy.cs.washington.edu:6060

 

FAMILY FINDERS:
FAMILYTREEMAKER.COM
www.familytreemaker.com

ANCESTORY.COM
www.ancestry.com

 

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.

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

 

ZIP CODE FINDER:
UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE
www.usps.gov/ncsc/lookups/lookups.htm

US Postal Service lists excellent lookup service.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

RESEARCH-IT!
www.itools.com/research-it

A good collection of useful reference materials.

CIA WORLD FACTBOOK
www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

The CIA's thorough country-by-country index with details on governments, geography and demographics of the different countries and regions.

WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY
humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/webster.form.html

This site is not pretty, but very useful. A searchable dictionary online.

ROGET'S THESAURUS
www.lightlink.com/bobp/wedt

A searchable thesaurus

WWWEBSTER DICTIONARY
www.m-w.com/netdict.htm

A version of the Webster's Collegiate edition, 1993 version with more than 160,000 entries.

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.

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.

ASKA+ LOCATOR
www.vrd.org/locator

This is one of a growing number of online question answering services (See search engines list)

PRICE'S LIST OF LISTS
gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/listof.htm

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.

FUGITIVE FACT FILE
www.hennepin.lib.mn.us/catalog/fff_public.html

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.

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).

CALENDAR ZONE
www.calendarzone.com

This is a directory of all kinds of calendar-related resources on the Net. It is excellent.

 

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

CONVERT IT
microimg.com/science

This is a good collection of conversion tables for calculating mathematical equivalents.

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.

DRIVING DISTANCE BETWEEN CITIES
pw2.netcom.com/~sodapop2/popdd.html

A terriific calculator of the distances between two major cities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.