"We are using Net Detective to really check out all of our new employees before we hire them. Using Net Detective I have made some rather startling discoveries. One applicant was wanted by the FBI for embezzlement and he was applying for a job in our accounting department."
- George L. Whitaker, Sacramento, CA
A Better Way to Find People
I suspect that’s what makes “people searching” so hot. As many as half a million times a month, someone searches on Google alone, looking for a way to find a lost person. Whether it's someone from the past with whom we’ve lost touch, or someone we met last weekend and yearn to see again, we’re always searching for others.
Unfortunately, most general searches fail. The information is out there, somewhere. But being forced to sift through so many unrelated results makes it nearly impossible.
That's why I recommended she use a people search service - sometimes they're called Internet Detective services. They pull all the information spread across thousands of servers and combine it into people-specific search databases. Then when you drop in a name or an address or a phone number, whatever bit of information you have, you get instant gratification. Up pops the latest scoop about your person.
That’s totally unlike the cold mechanical response a Google or Yahoo gives:
“Results 1 - 10 of about 55,100,000 for joe smith. (0.06 seconds)”
You can almost hear the search engine yawn…
By the way - most searchers don’t know this… search engine results don't actually extend beyond about a thousand entries. Even when the search engine results page says they found millions and millions of hits, they don't actually bother to dig it up and give you access to all of it. They're really just estimating from their own database tables. Even they know it's a waste of time.
Yawn, yawn, yawn…
On the other hand, it’s exciting when you do a person search on a dedicated database. You find what you’re looking for in seconds. Plus, you not only get current information, often you get historical data too. You find not only where the person is now but also where they lived or worked before that and before that and before that.
You can sort of see your old friend’s life laid bare. (Now what in heaven’s name was George doing in Poughkeepsie, New York, in winter. He always hated the cold…)
Sometime you find a person’s life didn't turn out the way you'd have thought. That’s when the Criminal Check
part of the service can help you find out what prison they ended up in!