By Jeff Koyen
It can be surprisingly difficult to find someone you may be worried about or with whom you might want to reconnect. Over time, emails bounce, social media accounts go dark, addresses and phone numbers change.
When the trail goes cold, search engines are of little help; because their website snapshots (or “crawls”) are periodic and largely static, search results cannot provide relevant, up-to-date contact details for the average person.
Put another way, search engines aren’t in the people-finding business.
“Our customers are really looking for data that’s as real-time as possible, especially when it comes to being informed,” says Steven Gray, CEO of PeopleConnect, which owns people-search platforms TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate and Intelius.
To locate lost acquaintances, we need services that go deeper to connect the dots. TruthFinder, for example, uses public records and other data not indexed by the major search engines to create up-to-date contact profiles that can help in times of trouble.
“TruthFinder aggregates publicly available data from a variety of sources, and we leverage our own proprietary entity resolution engine to quickly and affordably provide information on, really, any adult in the United States,” Gray explains.
To learn more about locating lost friends, family or acquaintances, we spoke to Gray as well as PeopleConnect CTO Shiem Edelbrock to explain the challenges and offer advice on getting started.
The Digital Disconnection Challenge
Whether it’s our browsing history, streaming habits or morning commute, we leave digital breadcrumbs with every step we take throughout the day. We therefore assume that, unless they’ve intentionally gone off-grid, locating an old acquaintance should be simple.
Consider, however, that the world wide web is only about 30-years-old, social media is a full decade younger than that and smartphones with GPS are an even more recent development. More than half of the American population lived more than half a lifetime without leaving any digital trail whatsoever.
“[When] a 25-year-old's life journey [is compared] to a 75-year-old's life journey, everything's different,” Gray says.
Here’s where public records come into play. The major search engines don’t index most public records, such as births, deaths, mortgages, and court documents. Likewise, they don’t index most of the so-called “deep web.” This includes message boards and online communities, paywalled platforms and private databases.
“[A search engine] only has what's available via the public web, and even not all of that,” Edelbrock explains. “There are a lot of sites that [it] doesn’t see, and it's going to see a snapshot of time [from] the last time [their bots] crawled that resource.”
Going Deeper To Create More Helpful Profiles
TruthFinder, on the other hand, seeks out every available public data source to create fuller, more relevant contact profiles.
“The data that we use is a combination of data that's available on the public internet and public data that is not available on the internet. Things like court records, addresses that are provided from mortgages, phone numbers from different carrier directories,” Edelbrock says. “We go really deep, using the public record to find that information for our customers.”
This data is collected, analyzed and stored on secured servers, and then cross-referenced with other data.
“What we do is…called entity resolution,” Edelbrock says. “We take all of the different data sources and we match elements amongst them.”
The name on a mortgage document, for example, might be found on a roster of college alumni, and that same name may connect to a criminal or traffic record. TruthFinder uses dozens of other uniquely identifying data points to confidently connect this data to the individual’s parent record.
Sources may even include pre-digital data that search engines don’t crawl. An entry in a phone directory from the 1980s, for example: one family’s long-forgotten phone number might provide the clue that connects a lost childhood friend to their current address.
“Data is never-ending [and] layers upon layers of information are stacked over time,” Gray says. “Often, the aggregation of historical data [provides] the entire picture of someone.”
Advice For Launching An Effective Search
So, how much information do you need to start an effective search? As little as a name.
Of course, beginning with more data makes it easier to disambiguate more common names. Gray considers his own name.
“There are 300 Steven Grays just in Southern California, if you can imagine that, [and] more than 2,500 Steven Grays across the country,” he says.
Even data that seems redundant can be helpful. Knowing the subject’s college might drive more results than simply indicating their childhood address. TruthFinder is designed to take advantage of these overlaps.
“We actually spend a lot of money on multiple datasets just for that reason,” Gray says. “We like having multiple data components from disparate sources [because] if they're layered on top of each other and they’re the same, we know it’s more determinative.”
Finally, identifying the subject’s own personal and professional acquaintances can help uncover their current location and contact details. Again, since the major search engines aren’t in the people-finding business, they don’t connect the dots that are needed to confidently identify missing people.
“The more data elements we have, the more matching we can do and the more confidence we can get about somebody's identity being one single person,” Edelbrock says.
