Thursday, 16 January 2025
Friday, 25 November 2022
How to Use the Invisible Web to Find People
The invisible/deep web is full of information not found on the regular/surface web, meaning that a normal web search engine isn't enough to dig up information on someone.
Wayback Machine
Archive of billions of web pages.
Catalogs books, news articles, memes, etc.
Vast site is overwhelming.
If the person you're looking for has ever created a website or has information you know was on the web but has been since deleted, you can look up that website via Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a database of hundreds of billions of pages archived from 1996 to the present.
This is a good way to view hard-to-find information because snapshots of websites—including many that are no longer live on the internet—have been archived here.
FamilySearch
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Over 1 billion unique profiles.
Search by name, place of birth or death, and birthday or death date.
Mobile apps.
Strangers can view or change family trees.
FamilySearch, one of the largest collection of genealogical and historical records in the world, is primarily a genealogy tracker, which makes it an invaluable deep web people search tool as well.
Type in as much information as you know, and this site will return birth and death records, parental information, and more. Digital preservation, digital conversion, general preservation of records, and online indexing is available here as well, all at no charge
Zabasearch
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Search by name with state or phone number.
Partial numbers and full addresses in results.
No registration required.
Some users express privacy concerns.
Most clicking takes you to another site.
Zabasearch is an extraordinarily effective invisible web people search engine. It pulls details from public records that include court records, country and state records, phone number listings, public transactions, voter registration records, and information that the individuals themselves put online.
This free service is somewhat controversial for the amount of information that it pulls in, but it's useful for genealogy searches.
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Full-Text Patent Database
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Getty Images
Search for patents by name or term and field of specialty.
View or print full page PDFs of patents.
Search before 1976 by issue date, patent number, and U.S. classification.
Must have information about the patent for an effective search.
If the person you're looking for has ever filed for a patent, you'll find it at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office full-text patent database. For patents filed from 1976 and beyond, you can see the inventor's name and the patent's title, as well as other pertinent information.
Melissa Lookups
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Interesting collection of search tools.
Useful tools to find information about people.
Get 1,000 search credits for free.
Charges for tiers of credits after free credits are used.
Some tools require you to make a user account.
Melissa Lookups offers a wide range of free tools you can use to plumb the deep web for people information. This site searches U.S. addresses, house numbers by ZIP code, IP location, names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and death information.
This site includes information for people in the US, Canada, Italy, India, Mexico, Singapore, Philippines, Australia, Germany, the UK, and some other locations.
192.com
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Specializes in searches for people in the U.K.
Basic search requires only a name.
Advanced options available.
Doesn't list the source of the data.
Registration and credits are required for most listings.
192.com contains data on people, businesses and places in the U.K. You can find full names, addresses, age guides, property prices, aerial photos, company and director reports, family records, and corporate information here, all pulled from a number of sources on both the general and invisible web.
Voter Registration Information
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Reveals the most recent physical address.
Likely more trustworthy than most other methods.
Usually must know the person's birthday.
Might work only in the US, and in certain states only.
Might be outdated if they haven't voted recently.
A little known fact is that you can find someone's home address using just their name and birthday. This is possible by looking up the person's voter registration information.
Some states consider vote registration information public record, and if the state has an online tool for finding this information, all you need to do is enter a few details about the person.
For example, if you know the person lives in Kansas, Kansas Secretary of State | VoterView lets you see their home address using their name and birthday. Other states should work similarly, but it's possible you'll need details other than their birthday, or their address might not be public.
Bing Advanced Search Tricks You Should Know
Bing is one of the world's most popular search engines, but are you using it to its fullest potential? Like most search engines, there are ways to perform advanced searches on Bing to drastically cut down the results and ultimately display the answers you're looking for.
Below are various advanced search tips you might not know you can use on Bing.
Bing isn't the only search engine that accepts advanced keywords and other time-saving features. If you prefer Google, for example, there are advanced Google Search commands available.
Reverse Image Search on Bing
A Bing image match search is an easy way to find pictures that look like another image. You do this not by using text like a normal search, but instead by giving Bing the image you want to use as reference.
Select the image button on the home page to browse your computer for the image, or provide its URL.
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After running the search using an image, you can find others that look like yours, locate related searches, find which websites are using that picture, and more.
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Bing's Advanced Video Search Options
There are several advanced search options when looking for videos on Bing. They're stored in a hidden toolbar that's only visible after selecting Filter.
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You can use these search options to quickly refine the results to videos that are less than five minutes long, 5-20 minutes in length, or over 20 minutes long.
There's also a date filter so you'll see only the items posted within the last 24 hours, or videos from the last week, month, or year.
Resolution, source, and price filters are also available when looking up videos on Bing. This means you can find just the longer YouTube videos, for example, that are at least 1080p in resolution.
Up-to-Date News on Bing
Similar to Bing's video search options, you can find recent news over any topic with the Bing News advanced search filters. You can sort the news by most recent and even filter out everything that's older than the last hour to ensure that you're getting the most recent news possible.
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Symbols to Streamline Your Bing Searches
These Bing search modifiers are other ways to get better results when searching for things:
| Bing Advanced Search Options | ||
|---|---|---|
| Symbol | Example | What It Does |
| + | +lifewire +help | Finds web pages that contain all the terms preceded by the + symbol |
| " " | "contact us" | Finds the exact words in a phrase |
| () | site:lifewire.com -(iPod tablet) | Finds or excludes web pages that contain a group of words |
| AND, & | house AND sale | Finds web pages that contain all the terms or phrases (this is how normal searches work by default, and it's an example of a Boolean search) |
| NOT, - | lifewire -iOS | Excludes web pages that contain a term or phrase |
| OR, | | iPod OR iPhone | Finds web pages that contain either of the terms or phrases |
NOT and OR Bing operators have to be capitalized for the search engine to understand them as they're explained in the table above.
Here's an example using a few of these symbols to drastically cut back the results (from thousands to just a dozen) to help find what we're looking for:
site:lifewire.com "mp4 file"
Advanced Bing Search Operators
The following are other search tips you can use to narrow down search results on Bing:
| Bing Advanced Search Terms | ||
|---|---|---|
| Keyword | Example | What It Does |
| contains: | tennis contains:gif | Keeps results focused on sites that have links to the file types that you specify |
| ext: | example resume ext:docx | Returns only web pages with the file extension that you specify |
| filetype: | filetype:pdf | Returns only web pages created in the file type that you specify |
| inanchor:, inbody:, intitle: | intitle:2019 inbody:wimbledon | Returns only web pages that contain the specified term in the metadata |
| ip: | ip:207.241.148.80 | Finds sites that are hosted by a specific IP address |
| language: | tennis language:fr | Returns only web pages for a certain language (requires the language code) |
| loc:, location: | loc:US | Returns only web pages from a specific country/region. To focus on two or more, use a logical OR to group them (requires the country or region code) |
| prefer: | tennis prefer:history | Adds emphasis to a search term or another operator to help focus the results |
| site: | site:lifewire.com iPhone | Returns web pages that belong to a specific website. Also works for TLDs (such as site:edu) |
| feed: | feed:technology | Finds RSS or Atom feeds about the search term |
| hasfeed: | site:cnn.com hasfeed:world | Finds web pages that contain an RSS or Atom feed on a website for the terms you search for |
| url: | url:lifewire.com | Checks whether the domain or URL is in the Bing index |
Don't include a space after the colon in any of these advanced queries.
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