THE BORED HOUSEWIFE'S GUIDE TO INTERNET SNOOPING

In the Beginning...

In my experience, http://classmates.com and/or http://reunion.com are the best places to start. If you are lucky, they will have entered a profile, which will help with the current state they are living in, and often their married names. Heck, you can even find out their political preference, and what kind of pets they have. If they are not listed there, try their high school's website, as often there is an alumni database there as well.

If they attended college, I search the university's alumni website. These databases will produce an address, phone number, degree information, and often an email address. This is also an excellent resource for finding out married names. Now most online associations require that you register before executing a search, which means you need to have attended or graduated from that university, but you are lucky, you will find a few that allow anonymous inquiries.

University of Wisconsin Alumni Association

http://home.uwalumni.com/Login.asp

University of Florida Alumni Search

http://www.ufalumni.ufl.edu/MembersOnly/

Tufts Alumni Search

http://www.alumniconnections.com/olc/pub/TUF/oldintro/oldintro.cgi

After Classmates.com and any alumni database searching, I usually move on to http://knowx.com. Now I know you're saying, "Hey, that's a pay site", and you would be right. However, there are a few free searches available there that can provide clues, including a people locator that offers a nationwide search of phone and real estate records. Also, it includes free searches for marriage and divorce records (in Texas, Nevada, and Florida). Other similar sites worth trying are http://ussearch.com and http://www.peoplefinders.com, which break down the results by city and age. All you need is a last name, and you will pull up all the records available per state, which could also give you clues as to if they have a spouse. If you click on the name, it will also give you past cities and states where there are addresses in it's database. To get detailed reports you have to pay, but I consider it a challenge NOT to pay, so we will need to move on from there!

If these sources have failed to provide any leads, there are the basic online white pages that you can try.

Switchboard.com allows multi-state searches

http://switchboard.com/

Infospace.com has reverse look up and email searches

http://infospace.com/

And most recently, the controversial Zabasearch.com which is the most accurate address search on the web. It often has old addresses as well, so it can be helpful in tracking down maiden names. Be advised: there is a link below the search box where anyone can register their name and email, and are notified via email when others search perform a search on their name. If you want to remain anonymous while searching this site, enter it through an anonymous proxy such as Guardster.com!

http://www.zabasearch.com/

Next, the Search Engines...

Now hopefully you've gathered a few pieces of information about that person, and now is the time to enlist http://google.com, http://yahoo.com, and http://lycos.com for more.

Start with their name in quotes (i.e. "Billy Bob Poentang"), and then without (i.e. Billy Bob Poentang). This is the tedious part of the search, because unless you are fortunate enough to be searching for someone with an unusual name, it will often take some time poking in and around various websites. I've found this step usually takes several attempts over a period of time to produce any decent leads.

Another way to get results is to do a search with just their last name followed by the @ sign in parenthesis (i.e. "Poentang@"). This is an excellent way to turn up a work email address (i.e. [email protected]). Then you can poke around in their employer's website (i.e. www.bigfancycompany.com) to find out what kind of company they work for, where they are located, and if you are lucky, a press release detailing the accomplishments of the individual.