The first tool  I would like to show you is one of my favorites when it comes to people search. Usually, if I can’t find someone on Google and can’t find them on Pipl, it means there is a slim chance of finding them at all.

As you can see, you can search people by Name and Location, Email, Username, or Phone Number, which is awesome because this adds a whole new dimension to your regular White Pages.

I’m going to do one sample search by name and one by username which are the most often searches. For both however, as you will see, a knowledge of the location of the person we are searching for, will make our life much easier.

Searching by Name and Surname

Ok so the first search we are going to do is by Name and Surname.

You might need to run this search when looking for contact information, for marketing purposes, especially when looking for the decision making people in a company.

To show you the sort of results pipl.com brings, I am going to run a search using my own name, because it is not right to post other people’s contact information without them knowing.

I just type Eleni Apostolopoulou in the search area and here are the results:

Now it returns Social Media profiles, physical addresses for all the people named Eleni Apostolopoulou that it can find. It would also return email addresses, if I or any of the other Elenis had one with our name on it, but we don’t so it doesn’t. For email addresses user-names generally return better results.

Now in my case even if you know the location, it doesn’t really help, except to rule out some results, because most of the Elenis are from Greece;  however if you know my face you can easily find my FaceBook profile,  where I have an email listed or my Linkedin profile, where I have my website listed with even more contact info there.  If you haven’t ever seen a picture of me (where “me” insert the person you are looking for), but you happen to know I am a Virtual Assistant, again you can see the Social Media profiles I have associated with my VA business, such as Linkedin and Google+ and get my contact info through there.

Searching by Username

Lets say you are browsing a forum and find a person you would like to contact without actually joining the said forum. People usually use user-names in forums, because they probably don’t want people knowing their real identity, but sometimes they don’t mind being contacted and in this case only, you can go ahead and try and search for them. So how do you go about doing this?

One helpful fact is that people usually  have the same username on various forums and social media, so they don’t forget it. Sometimes they even put it in their email addresses.

Again I will demonstrate how this works using my business username ApostolVA.

Here is where it helps to know the location of the person you are looking for, which is usually stated in forums, and  if you click on the ApostolVA, Greece result it will take you to a page with only results about my username. If of course you don’t know my location but know that my first name is Eleni, again you will quickly find a social media profile like twitter, where you can contact me.

Other features

What is really great about pipl.com is it’s extra search options. If you check on the left sidebar, you can narrow your search down by location and age; however it will only show options that are actually given in the search results.

If you select the “Advanced” tab, it will give you the ability to search a person using a combination of information, thus bringing more accurate results at once, without you having to navigate through all the irrelevant results.