Finding contact details for people

On the Internet it is possible to locate email addresses, postal addresses, telephone numbers and fax numbers, using searchable online directory services. What is not possible is to give any guarantees a bout what might or might not be able to be found. There is no universal directory of net users, nor even comprehensive coverage of names within any one country. And coverage is certainly unequal from country to country and from discipline to discipline. O n the plus side, the existing directories contain millions of names and corresponding contact details. As well as White Pages and Yellow Pages services, there are specialised directories such as directories of professional groups, databases of subscribers to mailing lists, campus and organizational directories, and a directory of people who have posted articles to Usenet newsgroups. Almost universally, these services are available via the World Wide Web.

The information contained in the directories on the net may be sourced from commercial directory publishers who use phone books and public records to obtain data. Alternatively, it may be generated by a robot which collects dat a from Web sites. Email addresses may be extracted from Usenet postings, submitted by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and/or a range of manually collected sources such as organizational staff listings, or self-submitted details from users. Internet dir ectory services may use a variety of technologies. The service may rely on a database held in a single location and interrogated from a single point using some sort of index searcher, or it may use a distributed database accessed through a common protocol such as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), Whois, or X.500. Information on popular tools for building and accessing directory services can be found under Directory Services.

Some of the leading people-finding services are now to be found under the umbrella of portal services, e.g. :

• The Ultimate Directory InfoSpace.com http://www.infospace.com/
  Offers searching for email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, businesses, company Web sites, and other material. Yellow Pages offer multiple search options for US companies, plus links to directories and information for a selection of other countries. White Pages offers searching to locate residential phone numbers and email addresses of individuals.
• Lycos Networld http://www.whowhere.lycos.com/
  Offers the WhoWhere People Finder in which you can search for email addresses, search for phone, postal addresses and Yellow Page listing for the U.S. For finding phone numbers for other countries, there are links to telephone and business directories by country Also on this site is a Web site search, as well as a number of specialist searches mainly oriented to U.S. users.

There are also major sites dedicated exclusively to directory services:

• Bigfoot http://www.bigfoot.com/
  Provides searching of email addresses, the Web and US Yellow Pages. Bigfoot's search engine is powered by LookSmart and AltaVista.
• WED http://worldemail.com/
  Multi-lingual service (English, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish) with a database of over 18 million email addresses and 140,000 business and phone addresses worldwide. is a combined Personal Directory, Phone and Fax Directory, Business Director y, Yellow Pages, White Pages, Zip Code Directory, Email Directory, Homepage Directory all in one.

Searching for people - Finding contact details for people - Finding email addresses - Finding phone and fax numbers and postal addresses - Locating people with common interests