Do More › Web & Search How to Use the Invisible Web to Find People Try these top people search sites to gather hard-to-find information Share Pin Email Print Web & Search Search Engines Best of the Web Safety & Privacy Running a Website by Jerri Collins Updated February 07, 2019 48 48 people found this article helpful When you want to know how to find someone, the invisible web is a wonderfully detailed treasury of data, yielding information that generalized searches are not able to provide. The invisible web is a gold mine of information you can use to find someone, and because it is larger by far than the parts of the web you can access with a simple search engine query, it potentially has much more information available. You need specialized websites to delve deep into the invisible web. The top people-search sites for the invisible web listed here can make your people searches richer, more detailed, and authoritative. Internet Archive Wayback Machine What We Like Contains archival images of 340 billion web pages. Also catalogues books, news articles, tweets, videos, and memes. What We Don't Like Contains only publicly accessible web pages and information. 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 that website up via the Wayback Machine, a database of over 340 billion pages archived from 1996 to the present. This is a good way to view hard-to-find information, as screenshots of millions of websites – including many that are no longer live on the internet – have been archived here. Visit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. FamilySearch What We Like Contains more than 1 billion unique profiles. Easy to start a search by entering a person's name, birthplace and date, or death place and date if you have them. Last name is required. Apps for mobile users. What We Don't Like Only one family tree per free account. Family trees can be viewed and changed by strangers. FamilySearch, one of the largest collection of genealogical and historical records in the world, is primarily a genealogy tracker, which makes it an invaluable people search tool as well. Type in as much information as you know, and FamilySearch returns 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 Visit Family Search. Zabasearch What We Like Easy to search by name with state or phone number. Includes phone numbers and addresses in search results. No registration is required. What We Don't Like Free advanced search requires logging in with a Facebook account. Some users express privacy concerns. 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 is useful for those who are performing genealogy searches. Visit Zabasearch. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Full-Text Patent Database Getty Images What We Like Easy to search for patents by entering a name or term and choosing a field of specialty. View or print full page PDFs of patents. What We Don't Like Patents before 1976 are searchable only by issue date, patent number, and U.S. classification. You must have some information about the patent for an effective patent 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. Visit the U.S. Patent and Trademark search website. Pipl What We Like Match rate and accuracy above industry standards. Returns information more varied than found on similar sites. What We Don't Like Free version is limited. Paid version is expensive. Pipl is specifically designed to dive into the invisible web for information. It retrieves results from databases that don't come up in regular search engine queries, which makes it invaluable for people search tasks. Location, age, and career are some of the information results that are retrieved here. Although Pipl still offers some information for free, it has altered its business model to include paid usage. Visit Pipl. Melissa Free Lookups What We Like Interesting collection of search tools categorized by the type of information the tool returns. Several of the tools are useful for finding information about people. What We Don't Like Must register for an account. Charges for tiers of credits after monthly free credits are used. Melissa Free Lookups website offers a wide range of free tools you can use to plumb the Invisible Web for people-search information. This site searches U.S. addresses, house numbers by ZIP code, IP location, names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and death information. The website also includes information for people in Canada, Mexico, and Europe. Visit the Melissa Free Lookups site. 192.com What We Like Specializes in searches for people in the U.K. Basic search requires only name and location. Advanced people search option available. What We Don't Like No information as to the source of the data. Paid service provides only publicly available information. 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. Visit the 192.com website. Continue Reading