There are many reasons why you might want to find a person, ranging from the frivolous to the serious. For example, you might just want to catch up with an old high school friend that you lost touch with many years ago in order to say hello and laugh about old times. Maybe you need to track down that old college roommate who suddenly took off and left you to pay the entire rent all by yourself. Or, perhaps you are adopted and have a desire to find your birth parents. Whatever your personal reasons for the search might be, it is often very easy and more cost effective to locate people through the Internet rather than through a private detective or other means.

The first thing you should do when trying to find a person online is to avail yourself of the free resources that are widely available. These include such things as email searches, general people searches, and address searches. These free resources are not very precise and tend to generate a lot of results. This obviously won't help you much if your subject has a common name; but if he or she has a bit of an unusual name, then the results might be useful. Another point to keep in mind about free people searches is that they are probably not going to give you any more information than a regular phone book would. So if your subject has an unlisted number, then he or she most likely won't appear in any online directories either. Also consider Infobel for free people lookup searches.