untangling_the_web

DOCID: 4046925
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Genealogy Sites
Genealogy sites always pop up on "search for people" lists-nice for
generating your family tree, but not usually pertinent for current research.
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Biographical Directories
The big biographical directories are fine for one thing: finding information
about well-known and/or successful people living and dead. Otherwise, they
are useless. People search lists always include links to "celebrity searches."
However, a few specialized biographical directories might prove useful.
'r The US Census
Census data for a number of different years is now online and searchable.
Again, a great genealogy tool, but probably not very useful for your research.
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Fee for Service Sites
There are a myriad for-profit people finder websites on the Internet. They may
or may not be good, but I am only discussing free products, services, and
sites.
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Finger
Finger is a UNIX utility that uses an email address to return information about
the owner of the address. Even today finger always seems to appear on
people finder webpages, but the fact is that the vast majority of sites disabled
the finger command years ago for privacy and security reasons, so it's
basically useless.
'r The MIT interface to the USENET Address Database
USENET is still accessible via the old MIT interface. I mention the MIT
interface (which contains over 4 million email addresses collected from
USENET newsgroup postings between July 1991 and February 1996 only)
because it continues to show up on "people finder" lists. However, it's almost
a decade old, which may as well be a century in internet time. Instead of
wasting time on the MIT USENET interface, why not go directly to Google
Groups? One reason: MIT does not obfuscate email addresses; Google now
does, so you might find an older but full email address in the MIT USENET
database that is obscured in Google Groups.
MIT USENET Address Database (1991-1996)
http://usenet-addresses.mit.edu/
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