Dozens of search engines exist to give you first clues on backgrounding individuals. This is not a comprehensive list. Just ones I've found useful in finding people online. The best test for most search engines is to put your own name in and see what turns up. Compuserve offers Phone File, America Online offers "White Pages" and CD-ROM's are available with the nation's phone numbers. Netscape also offers a "People" icon that provides various searches for addresses, phone numbers or e-mail addresses of people and companies.
Switchboard: www.switchboard.com Good tool for finding people and e-mail addresses. Whowhere: www.whowhere.com Also good as phone book, business resource and e-mail address finder. Yahoo's People Page: www.yahoo.com/search.people Lyco's People Find: www.lycos.com/pplfndr.html Excite's People Finder: www.excite.com/reference/people.html Broad search coverage by concept. See later reference to Excite for best journalism usage. Alta Vista: www.altavista.digital.com My favorite (so far) of all the search engines especially powerful if you know exactly what you are looking for. If you do put it in quotes and check it out, use the advanced search capability to designate word proximity in a phrase. Also a full-text index of Usenet newsgroup archives. Infospace: www.infospaceinc.com This one is good for finding people, e-mail addresses and directions to the location. It's one of several good mapping programs and gives directions in simple terms (like go right, instead of go west). Four11: www.four11.com 411 is great for searching e-mail addresses, white and yellow pages phone books and also has a reverse directory capability, when you have a number and want to know who lives there.
Internet Address Finder: www.iaf.net This seems to be the most comprehensive for finding e-mail addresses, including obsolete and old ones. Saavysearch: www.cs.colostate.edu/~dreiling/smartform.html It looks through multiple search programs and gives you a single list of hits back. I find it saves time.
Backgrounding Tools
Dejanews: www.dejanews.com
You can search for a topic, returning all the archived newsgroup messages that mentioned that topic, or search for an e-mail address to get all the messages that someone has posted (great for finding subject's interests). BUT BE AWARE: while you can read others postings on the usenet or news group, they can also read yours. A recent New York Times story noted that a well-known privacy advocate had posted 527 messages to usenet groups in the past 18 months, with postings to 32 different newsgroups, everything from a cyberpunk mailing list, a beer newsgroup and a Debbie Reynolds fan club.
Fraternity and Sorrority Connection: www.greek.com You can link to this site for some alumni links. Finding Faculty: www.petersons.com
They publish the textbook Register of Higher Education, a great resource for finding administration folks at universities. Not on-line yet. They do, however, have the best on-line service available to search for a university employee.
Finding Professionals
Profnet: www.prnewswire.com Originally run by Dan Forbush at the State University of New York - Stony Brook, it has now been merged with PR Newswire, a public relations wire service. They still take your request and broadcast it to thousands of university press flacks nationwide. Include your affiliation, a very specific description of the type of expert you are seeking and the type of questions you need answered and information on how to contact you (e-mail and phone). They usually get an answer.
American Medical Association Physician Select: www.ama-Assn.org
To find physician addresses and credentials, click from the home page to "AMA Health Insight" and then "Physician Select," AMA's reference source of professional information on individual physicians in the U.S.
Martindale-Hubbel: www.martindale.com/maps/./locator/home.html Excellent resource for finding lawyers and backgrounding them. Finding Officers: www.officer.com/officers.htm
This site is an unofficial collection of links to personal home pages of law enforcement officers. If a cop has a home page on the Web, it's here.
Biography Dictionary: www.tiac.net/users/parallax Includes over 18,000 prominent persons.
Alan Schlein can be reached at (202) 544-5893, or send e-mail to Schlein@access.digex.net