Using actual search engines to search for people or find information on people is a worthwhile search that's often overlooked by private investigators.There are several advantages to doing it. First, when done correctly; there is a good chance your going to find something if the subject has any web presence at all. Secondly, it's free and it's fast. There are some tricks you need to understand about how to go about doing this sort of thing. Here's the tips to give you the results.

Many search engines can identify capital and small case letters. For example, if you are looking for information on Richard Milhouse Nixon, you would use caps for the first, middle and last name and the rest of the letters need to be in lower case.

Many of the search engines have what are called 'Advanced"searching ability. Don't use the regular input page, go to the advanced page. Despite a lot of hype, some search engines actually have advanced features through their advanced page.

Use the "Near"feature to pull the name. Using the Near feature, you are telling the search engine that the names (first, middle and last) need to be near each other to register a hit and provide you the link. If you use "Near/2" you are telling the search engine that the names have to be only two words away. For example:

Richard NEAR/2 Nixon

will obtain hits such as

Richard Nixon
Richard Milhouse Nixon
Nixon, Richard

Some search engines don't have the Near function. When that is the case, you need to input the name in double quotes using the OR function. You also need to enter all the variables. For example, if we were doing Richard Nixon; it would look like this:

"Richard Nixon" OR
"Richard Milhouse Nixon" OR
"Richard M Nixon" OR
"President Nixon" OR
"Nixon, Richard"

You can use The "NEAR" searching function on

AltaVista-Advanced
Lycos Pro Search

You can use the double quotes with OR function on

Alta Vista- Advanced
Hotbot (Using The Boolean Phrase feature)
Excite
Northern Light

It's important to use more than one search engine to see what comes up. The reason for this is simple. You don't get 100% results from just one search engine. By using all the major ones listed, you'll increase your chance of a hit and not overlook pages indexed on one search engine and not the other.

You can see that by using the right searching techniques, it's easy, fast and free to see what kind of information you can pull on any individual off of search engines. Armed with this knowledge, you can now easily find people and find information about people through search engines. But that's not all! There is a couple of more things you can do.

Want to know if yours subject has made posts under his name to almost any newsgroup? No problem! You can do that on the internet. Just use the following source.

SEARCH BY NAME FOR PEOPLE IN NEWSGROUPS
http://www.reference.com/
Great search. Input a name and find out what people are saying in
newsgroups.

The Extreme Searcher's Guide To Web Search Engines A Handbook for the Investigator And Serious Searcher By Randolph Hock

CLICK HERE TO REVIEW THE ABOVE BOOK

 

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