People search

You’ll start out knowing a few things about your search target: perhaps just name, age and where they grew up.  In the process of the search adventure, you’ll add new pieces. 

If you run into some web sources, it is important to grab the content and the web link or URL (uniform resource locator).  I’ve seen a Time Magazine article appear, disappear and reappear on the Internet.  Some databases will go from being freely-accessible to being fee-based.

More often a website will disappear entirely for two reasons:

___  Age

___  Birthdate

___  Schools attended.  Classmates.com www.classmates.com is an excellent school affiliation site in which members can post information about themselves and any of the schools that they’ve attended, from elementary through university-level.  Registration is free and the information will be as complete as the member wishes.  Outside the United States, Friends Reunited is an extremely useful resource – and it tracks former co-workers too.  In addition, you can often track people through high school reunion websites – and don’t forget the alumni association.  For a college get-together several years ago, the alumni association was able to provide the mailing address of about 75% of “lost” classmates.   And, finally, many professional web pages list education, particularly college and university degrees.

___   Job affiliations.  Both current and past job affiliations can be important, particularly if you’re looking at archived or historical information.  Remember too, that a person's profession may have licensing procedures and your search target may be in their database.

___  Spouse’s name

___  Marriage or divorce dates. 

___  Parents names

___  Siblings names.  It may help you isolate a person when a name is common or they may be helpful if your search is of such a critical name that it’s worth sending them an email or contacting them by phone.

___  Hobbies or non-work affiliations, such as church or professional organizations.  For example, if your search target is a pilot, you’d want to check the FAA registration database.  You can also check the FAA's aircraft database to see if they own a plane and where it is based.  And you can even go further to see if a plane that they’ve owned has ever been in an accident at the NTSB Accident Database and Synopsis database.

Genealogy searches amplify the need for historical information, particularly places of residence.  Census records in the U.S., now public through 1930, are generally available every 10 years.  They have addresses attached but it can be hard to find people without knowing at least the town in which they live.  But more on genealogy searches in another knol, as they present unique problems and opportunities different from people search on those of us still alive.

Next: some tricks to focus your search …

If you’re searching for Prof. Michael Jordan, you’ll quickly see that there are millions of results – and most deal with the former National Basketball Association (NBA) star.  The quickest way to deal with that problem is to eliminate pages mentioning basketball and structure your search this way:

Michael Jordan -basketball   

Note that there are no spaces between the “minus” or “NOT” sign and the word 'basketball'.  Also be aware that by doing the search this way, any research that the professor might be doing on basketball or his participation in recreation basketball leagues will be excluded as well.

In this way we reduce the number of potential pages and Prof. Michael Jordan, a Berkeley statistics professor pops to the top of search results.

Another way to approach the Michael Jordan “problem” is to use a search string.  Here, when you put information in quotes, all of the text in the quotes has to appear together.  We could try these techniques to find the professor:

“prof. michael jordan”

“michael jordan” professer

There are drawbacks to this technique, including the fact that the Berkeley professer uses « Michael I. Jordan” as his given name on his website.  But this is a powerful tool if you’re seeking a woman who might have changed her name upon getting married.    If a Susan Smith married and changed her surname to Jacobs, you may profit with a search like:

“Susan Smith” Jacobs

In this latest example, you’re actually using the Boolean operator “AND”.  You’re asking the search engine, “What results are there for the text phrase ‘Susan Smith’ that also have ‘Jacobs’ somewhere on the page?”

For almost all personal searches, the major search engines return only two results per website.  They do simply to provide you with the broadest array of results.  The search designers assume that you’ll dig deeper if you get close to your search target.

Let’s go back to Prof. Jordan and see how much detail about him and his classes is on the Berkeley website.  Note that here there is NO space between the URL and the full site name:

Michael Jordan site:berkeley.edu

Now more than 8,000 documents emerge, including class syllabuses, PhD candidates that he is overseeing, and publications.  Documents that are deemed too minor or even out-of-bounds for English search results might emerge, such as an article that you child has authored in French for a school newspaper.

You can use these advanced operators on all of the major search engines either as indicated above or by clicking on “Advanced Search” links on the page.  But remember that if you’re working with another database, it is likely that they’ll require another format for Boolean search.

Three major search engines dominate English-language search: Google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo Search.  My experience is that you should use all three, as they will find slightly different results.

More importantly, remember that each has specialized databases that should also be checked:

·         News – and equally important the news archives. 

·         Images

·         Video

·         Books, which returns many magazine articles from the decade before the World Wide Web was invented