United States People Search

The best FREE online people-search resources for finding someone in the United States.

People Search
Search Using Quotes
Search Within Search Results
Search Using an Image
Search by Voice
Search Groups

People Finders USA: Yahoo and MSN

A good place to start searching for people is the totally free search engines like MSN and Yahoo which are some of the largest repositories of information on people.

Totally Free People Search Sites

Adding additional 'key words' related to the person helps the search engine to filter out people whose information doesn't fit the criteria. For example, searching for Bill Smith returns 835 million websites containing those 2 names. 'William Barrymore Smith' reduces the number of websites matching the search phrase to 6.9 million.

Search in Quotes

A little-known search function is to put a search phrase in double quotes ("search name here"). Doing that to our example returns no results at all, which means that there is no online resource (to which Google has access anyway) that contains the exact wording "William Barrymore smith Texas".

That brings up other questions: "Does text case matter?". Does 'texas' return different results than 'Texas'. Tx? TX? Long ago word format did matter and may still return a variety of SERPs (Search-Engine Return Pages) in some search services, but Google has smoothed a good bit of variation out, presenting very similar (if not exact) results regardless of capitalization, punctuation, etc. - even to the extent of showing websites and online resources with correct spelling when incorrect spelling occurred in the search phrase.

Search Within Search Results

Another cool browser feature is searching quickly through SERPs for a specific name or phrase. Hold the control key down and press F to open a search box. Enter a portion of the name or phrase sought. The search box will show two numbers like 1/24 and highlight the characters entered for every matching entry on the webpage. '1' is the first match and 24 is the total number of matches on the page. If there are no matches the numbers will be 0/0.

People Search by Group

When conducting a people search in the United States people may be grouped and found by classes:

Immigrants: People who came into the country legally, whether recently or centuries ago
Illegals: People who entered the U.S. illegally by border crossing or overstaying visas
Missing adults: People who reside or resided in or visited the United States who have 'vanished'
Missing children: Different from adults in that there may be different and less information on kids