The internet provides a surprising variety of ways to conduct a people search. With a little diligence, you are likely to find information about friends, ancestors, coworkers, classmates and family members.

The first step in performing your people search is to determine what type of information you are looking for. If you are primarily interested in obtaining contact information, your search will be relatively easy; you simply need to visit an online white page directory.

To use online white pages, enter as much information as you have on hand. The first name and last name will probably be requested, along with a state or city. If you do not receive desired results in your first attempt, you can try making your query slightly more general, either by omitting the city or first name. In so doing, you are expanding the scope of the search; one side-effect of a more generalized search is that you are likely to receive many more hits that will take longer to sift through. Also, if the person you are searching for has a common name, you may receive a significant number of results.

Online white pages, usually provide telephone and address info; some may also include an email address if it is available. The databases are rarely purged, so the information may be outdated, or there may be multiple entries for a particular person. In some instances, there is enough information to track a person's path from one residence to another. There are many online white pages, and you can find the most suitable one using your favorite search engine.

If you are searching for information that white pages do not provide, you can perform your people search elsewhere. Surprisingly, ordinary search engines sometimes uncover very interesting information about people that you are searching for. While you may not find their address or telephone number, you can often discover their place of work, club affiliations or hobbies and interests. Plenty of names show up on race results pages, conference attendance lists or on the minutes/agendas of community meetings. This information can help you craft further search queries to uncover even more information.

You can also take your people search to the many specialized services that can assist you in your quest. If you are conducting your people search to learn about your ancestors there are a whole host of sites specifically targeting genealogical information. With these genealogy services, you usually specify the surname and locality, and search through the records to uncover data that may help you complete your family tree.

There are other services that target special types of relationships. For example, there are databases that specialize in listing information of former students. You simply navigate to your graduation year and find your school, and you can get contact info about your former classmates. These services are particularly valuable because browsing through lists of former friends remind you of people that you forgot you knew! Also, classmate lists can help solve the maiden-name problem; suppose, for example, that you know an old friend's maiden name, but did not know her name after she got married.

Other specialty people search services include those that focus on lawyers, physicians, college alumni and realtors. So, if you knew that someone went to a particular university, you might try searching through the alumni lists. Alternatively, if you knew that an old friend was planning on becoming a doctor, you can search through a physicians directory to try to track them down. Note that some of these databases are only available to particular groups of people and may not be available to the general public.

If these sources do not help you complete your people search, there are paid services that provide much more information. Paid services collect information from a wide variety of sources that are not readily available. For example, they may collect court records, real estate records and magazine subscription information. By tying all of this information together they can construct detailed profiles of almost everyone. These paid people search services usually charge a flat fee and provide surprisingly detailed reports.

The privacy implications of all of this publicly available information are definitely worth mentioning. Not too long ago, people could live anonymously and their personal information was their own. In the age of the internet and expansive databases, disparate information can be combined to expose a wealth of data about a particular person. If you don't want your private information to be publicly available, you have to be extremely diligent and disciplined. In some cases, you can ask that your information be removed from certain databases.

The trend of collecting more and more information about people is primarily fueled by companies who use the information to help them target their wares. Imagine a company, for example, who is trying to sell legal pads. Mailing advertisements to the general public would be prohibitively expensive; but if the marketing campaign could be targeted at lawyers only, advertising conversions would likely skyrocket. For this reason, it is unlikely that this trend will subside absent substantive legislative intervention.