Trying to find a missing person? With thousands of databases online, the first starting place for many people is Google but there are many other lesser known search engines that a missing person investigator can use to track down and find a someone.

DIY Private Investigations searches the search engines to reveal little know people search tips and the online tricks of investigators.

YoName: Everyone knows about social networks and it seems like nearly everyone is on them but searching facebook, linkedin, myspace and dozens of other social networks can take time. Bring in YoName.com.

From a single website you can trawl across social networks, YouTube, Flickr, blogs and dozens of other networks. What I liked about this is that it it shows a picture from the profile of each person it finds so you can quickly identify if they are the missing person you’re looking for.  Free to use, it’s recommended although somewhat disadvantaged for UK use by its American focus. Free missing person search at: www.yoname.com

Spokeo: If you know the username the person you trying to find used online, their email address or a telephone number Spokeo should be high on your list of online destinations. From dating to shopping and music sites, Spokeo churns through 60+ networks finding matching accounts. Profiles at main social networks – facebook, twitter, youtube etc – can be viewed from a basic account while accounts on esoteric networks, soureforge for example, need a paid account. Find a missing person at www.spokeo.com

192.com: For missing persons not online, you need to search other record databases such as electoral roll and for this 192.com is hard to beat. Type in a name and rough location and the search technology behind 192.com will scour UK electoral rolls from 2002 to 2011, directory enquiries and the Birth, Marriage & Death registers looking for a hit. It’ll then present a list of people it finds.

What’s particularly useful is that it shows not just the names and locations of people it thinks correspond with the name you’re looking for but also shows the names of individuals also registered at the addresses it shows, so if you’re looking for someone who has run off with someone you can quickly identify hot leads.

Basic headline details are shown, to view detailed records you’ll need to sign up for an account at £149 and then buy “credits” to view the records. It may seem expensive but compared to alternative methods it can prove a lot quicker. The disadvantage is that it requires someone has established themselves in an area, registered on electoral rolls etc.  Electoral roll searches at www.192.com.

Pipl.com: Although similar to Spokeo and Yoname, pipl digs through the underbelly of the Internet to help find missing people and found a greater variety of sources, such as long past entries in Internet discussion forums, in the test investigations I carried out.  This can prove useful in that it could reveal information you didn’t previously know about someone to narrow your search elsewhere. For example, they might have posted a question years back which leads to an interest or location that can give you a new lead to follow up. Trace missing people: www.pipl.com

People Search Tricks With Google

Although the above search engines focus on people, the vast volume of information and number of websites Google knows about makes it a powerful ally in any attempts to trace a missing person. However due to huge amount of data it keeps the results it returns can often be overwhelming.  Thankfully there are a number of tricks you can use to improve the accuracy of the search results and reduce the amount of false-positive results Google displays.

Date range search: You can search for when Google indexes a web page by adding “daterange:x-y” to your Google search. x and y being the start and end dates. Unfortunately you’ll need to specify the dates in Julian format but there are loads of Julian date conversion tools. So if I was searching for online references to John Doe from June 1st to June 31st, I’d enter : daterange:2455714-2455744 “john doe”.

Location searches: Along with date, you can also narrow your search to location. Find the location setting on the left in Google and click on ‘Change location’. In the box that appears (before and after seen in the picture), enter the location you wish to search and click on ‘Set’. Now enter the name of the person you’re looking for as normal and Google will show results for the location given.

Better search results: If you’re searching for names, eg people, you’ll want to search for just pages where the words entered are next to or near each other. By default, Google will list pages where the words appear in the text but not necessarily next to each other. So searching for Arthur Doyle will find pages containing mentions of the creator of ubber private detective Sherlock Holmes but also pages with Arthur and Doyle in them and not necessarily about the detective story writer.  You can focus the results more accurately by placing quotes around the name, thus “Arthur Doyle” will show just pages where Doyle comes immediately after Arthur. But this search, matching just what’s in the quote, will find references to the musician Arthur Doyle as well as our crime writer. You could put Arthur Conan Doyle in quotes but this will then miss references to “Arthur C Doyle” – the quotes telling Google to find only exact matches. To get around this you could use the wild-card character “Arthur * Doyle”, where the asterisk means match any sequences of characters.

Alternatively, use the little known Google AROUND operator, which allows you to find words that are close to each other, entering : Arthur AROUND(2) Doyle will find all references to Arthur and Doyle separated by upto 2 words, including Arthur C. Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle – his full name.

Lastly, the above tricks are specific to Google but other search engines often have similar capabilities so it’s worth checking for their advanced search functions in your missing person investigations.

See also: Top 5 Books To Learn The Secrets Of Private Investigators

Picture: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.