How to Use the Invisible Web to Find People

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 150 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information, as screenshots of millions of websites – including many that are no longer live on the internet – have been archived here.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, 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 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 free information that it pulls in, but it is useful for those who are performing a genealogy search. 

Visit Zabasearch.

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 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 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.

MyLife is all about "reputation score." The site retrieves information from a wide variety of social networking profiles, proprietary websites, and public records.

You can see anyone's reputation score. You'll have to register to see detailed information (it's free), but the results can be worth it. 

Visit MyLife.