You can search for people on Social sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter. These sites have large number of users and every person using the internet very likely uses at-least one of these social networking sites. Searching these social sites will most certainly get you to the person you are search for.

You can also use google search, but it may not always deliver the best results and for one simple reason – Google relies on factors like incoming links to determine relevance of web pages. This works quite well for the regular web, but if you apply the same logic to people search, only profiles of popular people will surface at the top, even though there are many others on the web who share the same name.

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You could also consider using Pipl. This is a people search engine where you can find online profiles by the person’s name or even by their email addresses. Like Google, Pipl also indexes data from the public web – web pages, social sites, blogs, and so on – but then also clusters this data into profiles making it a little easier for you to find those long-lost friends.

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Pipl has a very simple interface. You can search a person by using Name, Email, Username or Phone. Username is the name which the person uses for creating account on popular sites. With this you can even add Location to the search.

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Pipl then suggests searches for the Name you entered. It includes various hints which may help you recognise the person. It also shows images and other links from the web. When you click on a link from suggestions, it then shows the info about that person in a profile like layout with persons image, location and relevant web and social profile links.

Related: How to Find Name and Location of Unknown Callers