NotEinstein
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1. Make a list of everything you know about this person: their current name, maiden name, nicknames, names of family members and friends, past jobs, places they've lived, date of birth, hobbies, etc.
2. Start searching the Internet with a search engine. Boolean searches will let you add specifics that will remove other people with similar names. The following searches will work with most search engines:
"John Q. Public" will search for pages that have the words "John Q. Public" in that order instead of pages that have John, Q, and Public in different spaces.
+"John Q. Public" will only list pages that have John Q. Public in them.
-"orthodontist" will remove any pages with the word orthodontist from the search list.
site:strangequestions.com will only search for pages on that website. This is particularly useful for local news sites, which often have weak built-in search tools.
3. Search with specialist sites.
If you have a phone number or address, you can find the name and address using WhitePages' reverse lookup:
http://www.whitepages.com/reverse_phone
http://www.whitepages.com/reverse_address
If you ran into broken links doing general searches, try The Wayback Machine at Archive.org. This is a search engine that connects to an archives old web pages.
There are many civil information databases on-line that aren't indexed by web searches. These will have everything from criminal records to property information, but must be accessed directly to get this information. If you know the general area where these activities took place, you can find the sites using searches like "(state name) criminal records."
4. Contact those who know the person you are looking for.
By now if you haven't found the person you are looking for, you should have enough information together to know who some of their friends are or groups they were involved with.
 Posted 5408 day ago
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