What Was Yahoo People Search?

Yahoo People Search was a search utility that could be used to find phone numbers, addresses, and email information. The search engine was accessible at people.yahoo.com.

How Yahoo People Search Worked

Some information that was found at Yahoo People Search was supplied by Intelius, an information retrieval organization that licensed this data to Yahoo. Most of the information found using the tool was absolutely free, but if you decided to pursue the information that Intelius offered, you'd have to pay.

The People Search tool funneled publicly accessible information from phone books, white pages, and yellow pages into Yahoo's search service. This information could all have been found on the web and was available to the public at large, meaning that none of it was sensitive, secure, or potentially harmful.

A person's last name was required in order to find a phone number or address. A reverse phone number search could retrieve names and addresses associated with that particular phone number, and a search for an email address (last name required) could return names, addresses, phone numbers, and related email information.

Yahoo People Search Privacy

Information found using Yahoo's people search tool was found in publicly accessible databases, online phone books, and public records. In other words, none of the information returned from Yahoo People Search was placed there without it being found somewhere on the web where it already resided.

You could request to have your information removed from the Yahoo People Search listings by using a removal form. However, this wouldn't delete your information anywhere else on the web.

Yahoo People Search Alternatives

There are several ways to find people online. Maybe you only have their number and you want to see who the owner is. Or if you have only their email address, you can do a reverse email address lookup to find out who the email belongs to. You can even find someone by their username.

There's also a Yahoo People Search tool hosted on iTools.com that might be similar to the original from Yahoo. However, the person you search for is queried against Spokeo instead of Intelius.