Best People Search Engines
A comprehensive list of search engines that allow users to look for people in various different ways, including by first and last name, a person’s phone number, address, social security number, employment history and others. Some of the web sites listed here only return results from standard public records databases while other aggregate them from multiple resources and display them in one central location. Use these sites to search for anyone online.
Top 10 People Search Engines |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Website | Alexa Rank* | Unique Visitors** | |
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2 | 165.6 M | |
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14 | 26.2 M | |
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800 | 21.4 M | |
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1919 | 9.5 M | |
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2488 | 7.5 M | |
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3386 | 8.9 M | |
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4012 | 2.8 M | |
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4289 | 9.9 M | |
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6030 | 1.1 M | |
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9210 | 1 M | |
Advertiser logos are highlighted and hyper-linked. *Alexa Traffic Rank (global) – updated in 2013. **Monthly Unique Visitors are based on US visitor estimates only, as reported by Compete.com.
Summaries
Facebook.com – Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin; Facebook is primarily a social networking website that also has a fantastic person search feature. Profiles are updated by the actual users, instead of getting its data by scanning public resources. So you can expect to get a lot of helpful information you won’t find elsewhere.
LinkedIn.com – Founded late in 2002, the LinkedIn website was actually launched later, in mid 2003. It’s a social network for business professionals that allows anyone to quickly and easily create a free, professional online resume. With 90 million plus registered users worldwide, it makes a great alternative resource to use when trying to find someone online. You can search by name, company, school, location and refine your results in a number of advanced ways.
WhitePages.com – Founded in 1996 by Alex Algard, WhitePages went live on the Internet way back in 1997. Currently it offers the ability to find people by name, zip code, area code, mobile phone and address. You can also locate businesses by company name, telephone number, location, address and type.
Spokeo.com – Founded in 2006, Spokeo is a search engine that aggregates significant quantities of social profiles, white-pages listings, and other personal data from a huge variety of publicly available information resources. It provides a simple-to-use interface for searching by name, email, phone and user.
MyLife.com – Launched in early 2009 by Jeffrey Tinsley, MyLife is the product of a merger in late 2008 between Reunion.com and Wink.com. It offers a subscription service for members to see who’s searching for them, get regular updates, and find out which sites their contacts and friends are using.
Intelius.com – Founded early in 2003, Intelius is a full-fledged business and consumer information service provider. They scan millions of public records to deliver results within seconds, for a number of advanced queries. It allows you to search for people by name, phone number, email address, physical addresses, social security number and username. You can also perform advanced background checks and use a number of other related services, but you’ll have to pay a premium to receive specific report information.
Pipl.com – Started in 2006, Pipl crawls the deep-web to extract facts, contact details, and other relevant information from personal profiles, member directories, court records, scientific publications and many deep-web sources. It displays that content on one easy-to-read webpage. Its results provide a ton of free info, but to retrieve additional details you’ll have to pay a fee to them or a third-party resource to get it.
PeopleFinders.com – Founded in 2002 by Robert Miller, it is a fee-based subscription service that searches billions of public records to help you to find individuals and businesses. You can view by names, reverse phone numbers, addresses, social profiles, criminal records, and SSN. It also offers background checks; which you can get by paying for a one-time report or through a monthly subscription.
123people.com – Founded in 2007 by Martin Stemeseder and Markus Wagner, it’s a real-time meta-search service for people. The site scans a number of available Internet sources and aggregates the data into one result. That includes blogs, social networking accounts, images, web links, micro-blogging platforms, videos, news, documents, domain names, phone numbers, and business profiles.
PeekYou.com – Focuses on indexing the public web around humans and their website addresses. Over 250 million individuals and their URLs have been indexed. In addition to searching first and last name, it allows you to refine your query by region, age, sex and username.
Please keep in mind these top 10 lists are based on Alexa Traffic Rank only, and do not represent our opinion regarding which website is better than another from a user’s perspective.
Some websites that were on the 2012 top ten list have been removed, while others may have been added for the first time.
If there are any we missed, or you would just like us to review your site, don’t hesitate to send us the information via our contact form.
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