Although you won't find a universal phone book with everyone listed, unless you work for the CIA, with a little persistence you can do a telephone reverse number lookup of just about any number and figure out who the phone owner is as well as a lot of other information.

The easiest first step is just to use Google to do a search. Put the phone number into the Google search page and see what you get. Try different formats such as 555-555-5555 and 555 555 5555. Also try putting the number in double quotes. Another trick is to combine the number with phrases such as "my number is" or "my phone is" since the person you are looking for may have left their number on a forum along with such a phrase.

Try a free service such as www.WhitePages.com. You may find the information you need, but realize that all the free services only contain listed landline numbers and are often very out-of-date. A search for "free phone reverse number lookup" or "free phone lookup reverse" will get you a number of similar services that can give you basic name and possibly address for landlines.

If you enter a cell phone or unlisted number in the free services you will get no more than the name of the carrier and possible the city where the owner lives. And they will try to talk you into paying to get more information. And let's face it, most of the phones you might want to research these days are probably cell phones, or even unlisted numbers. So what do you do now?

The only publicly available databases with cell phones have been put together at considerable expense to someone and they want to be paid for their efforts. Sorry, but this is a fact of life. Also the quality of the databases varies considerably from one company to the next. Most of the websites that advertise having complete databases really only have slighly more than the free sites, and their listings are years out of date.

Probably the most comprehensive database is the so-called RPD Database which contains the most recent data on most of the landline, cell and unlisted phone records for the US and Canada. One site where you can access the RPD Database is ReverseDirectoryTrace.com.

The ReverseDirectoryTrace.com site will get you extensive information on every type of phone nubmer in seconds. You will have to pay a nominal fee for the service but they also offer, for slightly more than the cost of one telephone reverse number lookup, an annual registration that lets you do an unlimited number of phone number and general people searches for an entire year. I think you will be surprised at how often you will find you want to research a person when it is so easy.

I hope you learned some things that will be useful the next time you need to do a telephone reverse number lookup.