The worldwide web is a pretty big place, filled with articles, images, videos, and a never-ending slew of social media content, right at our fingertips. With all of this information and a stream of content that seems to never end, it can be easy to get lost or carried away.
At the same time, the Internet can be an incredibly useful tool, especially if you want to find someone in particular. Suppose you lost touch with someone, or you want to reconnect with a old friend or relative. A good place to start the search is nuwber.com.
What should that search look like?
How to Find People Online
Here are 5 hacks for finding almost anyone on the web through true people searches and tactics:
- Start with a Catch-All Google Inquiry:
Regardless of how much you know about the person you are searching into Google, it’s still the first place you want to start. Quite simply, Google is the largest search engine in the world, which means it is home to a larger sum of information than any other option available to you.
Open up Google and start searching everything you know about the person. A name and location is all you need to get the search underway. Bonus points if you can include keywords, like their career, where they went to college, job, and marital status. This will probably bring up their social profiles, which can be a great place to aggregate information.
- Leverage Facebook:
Facebook is still the largest social media platform in existence today. With 1.59 billion people logging into their accounts daily, Facebook is a great place to hone in on the information you desire.
Inside Facebook’s People Search, you can specify your search by name, hometown, current city, mutual friend, school name, employer, and other higher education institutions.
If the person you are searching has no social presence, you can move onto their friends and relatives.
- Try Another Search Engine:
After Google provides you with the initial information you need to really dive deep into your query, try other detailed, lesser-known sites, like snitch.name. Since social networks have very limited indexing with Google, snitch.name makes it easier to find this information by prioritizing “people pages.”
You can also try Social-Searcher, another web app that specializes in crawling social networks and other platforms. You don’t even need to make an account. Social-Searcher scans Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Dailymotion, and Vimeo.
- Don’t Forget About Images:
There are plenty of images floating around the internet when you do a basic Google search on someone. Well, that image could be the source of the information you seek. If you’re sitting down for a free online people search, check out TinEye. With this tool, you can upload one image, sit back, and allow the app to scan the image and provide all of the other instances in which that image pops up online.
Using these results, you can find social media profiles that have been abandoned, and even dating profiles, which can be a treasure trove of information.
If you don’t want to use TinEye, consider Google Images, which does a reverse image search after you click the camera icon in the search box. Upload the image you want to search, sit back, and see what the results produce.
- Re-Search Usernames:
Don’t forget that most people are going to recycle the same two or three usernames on all sites. It’s hard to try and remember 20 different passwords each day, which is probably why you’re guilty of the very same thing. If you find a username in one place or social media site, try searching that username into all other sites. Don’t forget about forums like Reddit, as well as old blogs.
The internet is more powerful than you might realize. Every day, when we sign online, we release personal information and other markers that make it easy for people to find us through searches. That’s why you should be using the internet in its most basic sense for finding almost anyone on the web. All you have to do is start typing!
Start Your Search
Through reverse image searches, dropping keywords in Google, using alternative search engines made specifically for people searches, using Facebook’s already available information, and regurgitating usernames, you will find that your targeted search is a lot easier than you might have realized.
Discover long lost friends, get in contact with people you lost touch with, and leverage the internet to its fullest capability starting today.
About the author: Louise Baldree has worked in IT and while on maternity leave she enjoys writing articles on topics like Lifestyle, Social Media, Online Security and, of course, Babysitting. When she is not writing, you may find her traveling across the world, eating sushi or enjoying life with her family.