HOW TO FIND PEOPLE ONLINE

The web is an incredibly useful tool for tracking people down, be they old friends or new business contacts. Here's 14 smart ways to find someone's details online.

Get started with Google
Google isn't brilliant for finding people, as personal details are often stored privately, but it's a good means of sourcing general information to get your search started. Be sure to enclose the name you're looking for in quotation marks, for example "John Smith", and enter relevant words such as the person's occupation, hobby or last-known location. You can also check that you've got the right John Smith by searching Google Images for visual results.

Search social networks
Social networks such as Facebook and MySpace let you search for people by name, filtering results by age, location and interests. You may only be able to view a cut-down version of the person's profile, but you can usually send them a request to become a friend or a message. If they accept or respond, then you're in touch. It's also worth checking professional-networking sites such as LinkedIn if you're looking for a work colleague or business contact.

Use Friends Reunited for free
In response to the enormous popularity of Facebook and the like, Friends Reunited has now dropped its subscription fee and is completely free to use. This means you can search for, contact and reply to old school friends and colleagues without paying a penny for the privilege. Its spin-off genealogy site Genes Reunited is a useful tool for tracing lost relatives, but charges £7.50 per year for standard membership.

Search the electoral roll
The electoral roll lists everyone in the country who is eligible and registered to vote. The People Search tool at 192.com lets you access electoral roll data from 2002 to 2008, as well as public information such as phone-book entries. You can search by name and location for free but, if you want to view detailed results, you'll need to sign up with the site and buy credits. Prices start at 23p for one search, which can yield up to 200 results.

Browse blogs
The popularity of blogging means that many people regularly post thoughts, ideas and news to the web, often under their real names. You can generally interact with bloggers by commenting on their posts or by email, if an address is given, so a scour of the blogosphere could prove productive. As well as Google's dedicated Blog Search and blog-aggregator Technorati, you could try the People Search facility at YoName. This combs a wide range of blogging services and social networks for names, usernames and email addresses, and is completely free to use.

Search Usenet
Usenet is an older part of the internet containing newsgroups. It's less popular than it used to be because most people now prefer web forums and social networks for their discussions. However, it still exists and – more importantly – so does an exhaustive archive of Usenet posts. Browse to Google Groups and choose Advanced Search. You can search by author name and keyword, and narrow results by date. This could turn up old posts made by the person, which may include an email address or other contact details. Similarly, you can use Twing to search online forums.

Browse online records
123people.com is a website dedicated to searching for people. Type in someone's name and it will trawl through millions of public documents held on the web. What's especially useful, is how returns are listed; searches are broken down into categories from social-networking sites, blogs, videos, images. Phone numbers and emails are also listed where they are in the public domain. If you're in the business of looking for people, bookmark this site.

Find information on a company
You can find information on a company using Companies House. Companies House is where all companies in the UK are legally obliged to register and record various information, such as shareholders, directors and annual accounts.The WebCHeck service, which is available from Monday to Saturday 7am to 12 midnight UK time, lets you search through more than two million company names and addresses free of charge. You can check the insolvency history of a company and reference dates for accounts and annual returns. To order copies of any documents, such as company reports it costs from £1.

Search the Land Registry and SIX more top tips