Published April 09, 1997
A challenging missing-persons assignment: to find an uncommon named person fast. She is known to have used the Internet.
Slogging through search engines, Web indexing phone numbers and E-mail addresses like Yahoo’s People Search, Switchboard, archive of bulletin boards, and DejaNews, found nothing about Miss X.
Dozens of resources later, a successful identity, this time at InfoSpace, the proclaimed “ultimate directory,” yielded a CompuServe E-mail address and city of residence.
Bulletin board postings and public records were scanned. Available military and university indexs were inspected.
Grabbing the familiar corded wonder, POTS (plain ’ol telephone service), manually dialing for telephone directory assistance the old fashioned way. On the first ring of the next call she answered—a successful search, only in part using the Net.
Fewer than most searches for missing persons are successful, largely because there is no paper-trail. But improvments are constant.
Being an amateur detective using the Internet is fun, maybe necessary, but usually daunting. Here are a few clues to explore positive results. Ask yourself the appropriate questions.
The Private Investigators Mall provides referrals to investigators, tips on conducting searches, and a list of links. The Stalker’s Home Page focus is the protection of private information. Tipped-off Pages are useful links and instruction to Cybersleuth. Sherlock—The Internet Consulting Detective, the Internet Sleuth, and CNet’s Search.com are storehouses of tips and links.
Just the Facts is home for free publicly available addresses, phone numbers, and E-mail. Yahoo or Excite’s People Search of Net users is a different but sometimes overlapping resource. InfoSpace and DejaNews are limited archives of bulletin boards. Switchboard and Four11 White Pages are popular US telephone and E-mail directories.
Military City Online Web Outpost, is logically a search source for armed services personnel. Gopher, a separate utility of the Internet, different from the World Wide Web, links to university and other directories. ReuNet, the original missing persons network, is often very useful. Ancestry Search includes a free Social Security records lookup of deceased Americans and other links.
KnowX and Confi-chek will scan court public records at a reasonable fee for found information. Membership based CDB Infotek and Westlaw are popular Web databases used by professional investigators (very expensive).
Intelligence sources, not on the Internet, are full fee services such as Nationwide Investigations; Pritchett Bureau of Investigation; and the Integrity Center.
If all else fails, follow the links. They may lead to snail mailing addresses to write for information and vital records.
Distinctively, the Internet’s repository, enormous in all its splendrous distractions, is reasonably new. Older and archival data either has never been placed on the Net or never will.
Milla Cummins, our public library director, mentions this too. Reasonable expectations must accompany searches for information, she says. Often the more traditional sources are the best.