Being in the IT industry, family and friends always find it useful to ask me about finding information on people. While some are easy to find, using free sites like yahoo people search, and zabasearch. I slowly began to accumulate a rather large list of names and phone numbers people wanted information on. While doing free searches, I often see advertisements for complete information search, with some being outrageously expensive, almost 100$, while others not seeming too bad, around 35$, but always really wondered how well they worked.
I decided to try out two sites which seemed reasonably priced, go through each of the 54 names and 17 phone numbers I had on my list, and see how well they did. I decided to rank them in a few ways, first an overall answer rate, that is, the amount of entries found. Second, I ranked them on the amount of information on each entry, for example, the name for a phone number is nice, but an address is better. Third, the correctness, as most of these people needed to be contacted. The third one I weighted less, as even if information is a year old, it is usually easy to track someone down if you have a place to start. Each is ranked out of 5.
The service I tried was www.PublicRecordsPro.com, which advertised more records, around 300 million, and included many extra searching features for 35$.
The record site was also very easy to sign up for, and allowed instant access to all records. The site was able to find 47 of the 54 names, and 17 of the 17 phone numbers. There was more previous information on older addresses or phone numbers, which was also quite useful. 4.5 out of 5
The site offered a lot of information, although some of it was not very useful, it was thorough. Both websites seem to share common data, but they do include their own information from various sites. The website was especially good at providing background and family history information. 4 out of 5.
In order to verify, I once again sat down with 47 names and numbers, and 17 numbers and information, to see how many ended up being correct. To my surprise, all of them were. It seems www.PublicRecordsPro.com actually checks against false data, either through their service, or through their provider. This was a great feature, as it would save a lot of time looking up information, 5 out of 5 for an overall ranking of 4.5 out of 5.
All and all, these services worked quite well, and as advertised. For only 30$-35$, I was able to use people search to find information regarding almost every person on the list. I still use the service to check up on records, and even got bored and found some high school friends one day. Quite a good resource. An overall score of 4.5 out of 5.
