Are people search engines reliable?

The thing is that Spokeo and others will return multiple responses for the same person, somtimes years out of date. They don’t prioritize based on age of the data.

I used such a service to try to contact a neighbor recently. It did not have complete information, was missing some people and addresses, and had some random/false noise entries, but it did have enough to let me find/contact the person I was looking for, after several failed attempts at wrong numbers and bewildered former associates.

The service I ended up trying was BeenVerified.com, after first trying some free sites and getting nothing, I turned down BeenVerified.com’s annoying initial offer and then got offered a trial for $1 (IIRC), which I did but then cancelled before they would’ve charged me $26 or something.

I think such sites mostly just collect publicly available information with automatic web-crawlers, with some ability to correct some information, so naturally you get a lot of noise from old/fake/wrong info, and much stuff is not there. It was interesting to see what they did have on me and some people I know – thankfully their information wasn’t great.

I think such sites mostly just collect publicly available information with automatic web-crawlers

This is true.

I hunt for people a lot for my work. We will start with the common aggregators, usually Whitepages.com and call the numbers and ask if it’s the right person. I don’t track carefully, but I would bet success is less than 30%.

There is no dependable directory of people on the Internet. Some people simply don’t leave much of a trail.

The 2 that I use that seem to be reliable are

instantcheckmate.com and
beenverified.com

Instant Checkmate was my first & after joining, I looked up a lot of friends so I’d have a better idea how thorough they were. They were pretty accurate. I’ve also tracked down some old friends that I’ve lost touch with. Since they also include deaths with theirs, I look up old friends to see if they’re still alive. For a little extra, I can track phone numbers through IC also. I find that invaluable when I receive calls from unknown numbers so I can decide who to block.

I signed with Been Verified on a whim to check IC even closer. BV seems to have good results. Their phone tracking seems to be spot on.
Their phone tracking doesn’t cost extra but they’re a bit more expensive & You have to pay for 3 months at a time.

Between IC & BV, I’ve been able to locate a good number of friends & relatives. It seems if whoever I’m looking for isn’t on one site that they are on the other. When I met my husband, I also ran a background on him to see if what he had been telling me jived with what both sites showed. It did so I felt a lot more comfortable with his ability to be honest.

If you don’t like & want out, all you need do is call them & ask to stop your service. They don’t give refunds but you can still use them until your subscript expires & they don’t renew. I think both IC & BV give you a free trial of a week or so to give you time before they start charging. I’ve been with both for 2 or 3 years & I’ve not grown dissatisfied.

I’ve never tried Spokeo & assume they come up first on search engines due to their expertise on meta tags. Then again, I could be wrong.

Now, I tried a 3rd site Truth Finder but I found them to be way too expensive for the information given & could get just as good of info from IC & BV so I ended up dropping TF. Their info also didn’t seem to be as accurate.

With IC, you can get criminal records for about $20 extra. They do show you a limited record of what you’ll be paying for. I discovered that one guy I was dating had a checkered past & when I asked hij about it, he lied. So, he’s no longer in my life!!!

BV has a similar setup on criminal records except they require more info before their search works. I’ve never paid for their criminal info because it costs extra per each location search. So, if the person you’re checking on has a criminal record in 3 different counties, you have to pay for 3 different reports where IC’s is all in one report. Both are a little slack in the Marriage License reports but I’m not that interested in those. With more digitized marriage records, I think they’ll be catching up soon.

You can also check on yourself IF you find anything inaccurate, you can request that it be corrected.

I’ve never tried Spokeo & assume that hey are first on search engines because they are good with their meta tags. Of course, I could be wrong.