People Search Engines and Public Records

Abstract

In today’s digital age, most people have some kind of online presence, either directly or indirectly. Other entities—such as government and local authorities—also store some type of information about their citizens in publicly accessible databases. Searching for someone is not always as easy as typing their name into Google or Facebook; people with a small online presence will not appear easily when searching for them online. In the previous chapter, we demonstrated the importance of social media sites to find people online. In this chapter, we will continue our discussion of how to find people online using specialized websites known as people search engines in addition to looking up people in government records (also known as public records).