Finding People

In the November 2008 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine, I learned about four new-to-me sites for finding people.

• Wink People Search - Billed as the world's largest people search engine, this site helps you find people and helps people find you. Wink.com has more than 200 million people profiles from across the Web, including social networks and other online communities. By creating a profile on Wink, you can manage your web presence.

• Pipl - Described as "the most comprehensive people search on the web," Pipl differs from a typical search-engine because it is designed to retrieve information from the "deep web." Also known as "invisible web", "deep web" refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines.

• Intelius - Intelius is an information commerce company that provides consumers and businesses with "predictive intelligence for important everyday decisions ... to make choices about people, businesses and assets."

• ZabaSearch - A free people search and public information search engine

The next time you're looking for information about someone -- an old friend, a professional colleague, or otherwise -- consider trying these sites. I looked for the names of a few people I know and was amazed at how much I could find out for free. Ponying up some cash or creating a member account would have garnered even more information.