Internet Detective Online People Finders

Let me tell you a story. Back in early Internet time, in 1995, a site called Web Detective appeared in the USA. Highly popular for almost ten years, it consisted of a massive collection of links to other online investigation resources, such as the different U.S. government public record sites, Social Security Admin, county circuit court records, files on marriages and divorce, adoption and births and deaths. People found these resources useful for locating someone who was lost and for looking up family history records.

Then in 1996 in Florida a smart entrepreneur named Jean Harris started up her own version named Net Detective, which quickly began to overtake Web Detective in sales and popularity. It now has about 800,000 site members, being home or office based amateur online investigators plus hundreds of professional law enforcement agents across The United States of America, as well as private detectives in the large American cities.

Net Detective started as a downloadable software program for windows® computer systems that resembled an e-book with convenient tabs linking to pages for people search, background check, social security, death records, military buddy searches, etc. etc. In about 2001-2002 it changed completely to a web based search system, because of problems with software registrations and more importantly because the company found they could easily provide more resources in a web-based system.

Around the same time Net Detective successfully developed its own in-house database of records on 211,500,000 U.S. citizens. This move put it way ahead of the competition which was growing, but all competitors at the time were still only providing links to other external investigative resource sites.

There came other imitators known as Online Detective, Cyber Detective and Gov Records. All tried to focus on the popular and lucrative areas of U.S. people search and providing almost instant background checks for pre-employment, human resources departments in American businesses and industry, and finally on tenant screening for landlords and property owners. The cry was... "find out anything about anyone" or "investigate anyone" or "Find out The Truth About Anyone!" These memes and taglines worked miraculously on an Internet audience bent on instant gratification and driven by impulse.

The people finders have been joined by larger companies such as Anywho® and Switchboard® and Yahoo! people search. These large operations receive the vast bulk of people searches online. Another company that has emerged recently in this arena of people finding integrates vast databases and focuses more on specific government records on a state by state basis. It also delivers a popular reverse cell phone lookup service and a full background report on U.S. citizens, legally under the federal F.O.I.A.

People search online is also provided by Classmates® and Facebook® and MySpace® etc., and others which build their own databases based on user input or "user-generated content." This is extremely clever and works as an effective people finder when member numbers approach 50-100 million members. I believe that MySpace® may now have 200 million people involved!