General Approach to Searching for People
There are a variety of means for tracking down a living individual. Anyone alive in the last twenty years in a developed country has most likely left a "footprint" or identification trail on the internet, even if that person never used a computer.
Every time someone uses a credit card, gets a driver’s license or pays their property taxes they leave an electronic footprint of their activities. These virtual footprints can be traced with the right tools. The most common means – and the subject of this article – is to track down an individual by their name.
The general approach that we use to find someone on the internet is to first do a quick search using Google. If that does not work, then we will try a more detailed search using the people search engines listed in this article.
Usually, when we are not successful with Google we will also not be fully successful with specialty search engines. However, people search engines are very useful at gleaning partial information about a person. For example, we may be able to determine where a person works or some of their hobbies or the region where they live. This information is usually enough to allow us to then go back to Google and do an advanced Search incorporating the newly-found information. An advanced Google search incorporating refined information is usually enough to locate an individual.