Free People Search Engines

From Consumer Alerts: Beware of People Search and Background Check Scams

Widely publicized reports cite that up to 30% of all internet searches handled by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the smaller search engines are people search related term.  This growing need to connect with other people from the past has been the catalyst in the large increase in public record companies offering direct people search engines to the general public for a fee.  For as little as a few dollars, anyone with an internet connection can search for people that they would like to find again.  Other sites offer people search access for a monthly or yearly subscription.

An even faster growth sector is the so-called “web 2.0″ sites that specialize in providing web space for people to post all sorts of personal information about themselves.  Sites like Myspace and Facebook are wildly popular with teens and young adults, and others provide users with an electronic forum with which to post bio’s, hobbies, interests and much more .

Most interesting of all are the new “people search 2.0″ sites Wink.com and Zabasearch.com.  Unlike the traditional search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, these free search engine portals dig deep into the social web 2.0 sites, leveraging correlating information on people and addresses.  Most of the data that these sites retrieve and index is truely unique and not to be found in other free search engines.