I recently made a little guide for my co-workers that have been looking to improve their skiptracing methods past the proprietary databases and standard 411 and anywho searches. I feel by utilizing the methods in the guide, you will greatly improve your skiptracing skills.

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411.COM
- Don’t forget to utilize the “advanced search” feature in the whitepages section. Rather than looking for mults in a certain town, you search for a street addr. Or click the surrounding towns option to search in a specific town and all nearby towns.
- When skipping current #’s put the # and info associated to that in Win-10. That way you can use it as ammo during a talk-off with a dtr or a skip.
- When doing a reverse search on a street addr. just go for the parent addr., rather than including the street or road abbr. Example – “55 main” rather than “55 main st.”

ZABASEARCH.COM/advanced.php
- I’d stick with their advanced search feature. From here, you can the full name (first, middle initial, last name), dob year, town and state – which really narrows things down. Sometimes the results can vary a little, but there’s great mult info with this resource.

WINK.COM
Wink.com is a free people search web site that allows you to search over 270 million people profiles across social networking sites. I ran a search on myself – Eric Neal, MA. It didn’t show up with much. But it did show my limited college experience
- Simply run your search and click on the underlined name at the top. Then under the “Where am I online” section, click on the different links to gather info on your skip.

SPOCK.COM
This is an excellent people finder. While I still love google for searching, this search engine in similar, but they only focus on people searches, so you don’t get a bunch a stuff you don’t need.
- I did the following search (w/o the quotes) “Eric Neal MA” (my name and state). Some of the results are definitely not mine, however the first two are. It gives you my basic stats and myspace profile. (I know it’s tempting, but try not to stalk me).

SSDI.ROOTSWEB.COM
Social security death index. You can search by a person’s social security # or contact info to find date and place of death.

VINELINK.COM
Search by state to see if someone is in prison. Pretty accurate, but the person may still be in prison if they’re not listed here.

BOSTON.CRAIGSLIST.ORG Try searching craigslist under the jobs or housing or sales section to see if a debtor name, phone #, or addr is listed. Sometimes you can get valuable info such as cell #’s, personal info, etc. (on the right side of the page, you can click the skips most likely city).

GOOGLE.COM
- One of the best ways to do a name name search on google is the following (with the quotes): “John Smith” Lawrence, MA
Then just start searching through that results that look likely for the skip.
- If it’s an uncommon name, try just the name in quotes (first and last) and state initials. If it’s a very uncommon name, try just the person’s name in quotes with no state.

- You can also try the street addr in quotes and the town and state.
Example: “25 Flagship Dr” North Andover, MA
(using quotes forces google to search for the exact phrase)

- If you want to search for someone related to a certain business or school for instance, search: site:mit.edu “john smith”
The search will find web pages only in MIT’s website containing the name “John Smith.”

- The following search will give the definition of any given word (theoretically).
define:donut
(in case you don’t know what a donut is)

- This search will find residential listings with google’s phonebook feature. You must use lower case for the first search. After the first search, remove the “phonebook” word:
phonebook:smith lawrence, ma

- Google has a world clock feature that will tell you what time it is in any major city:
what time is it in hong kong?

- Google sometimes let’s you look at websites or pages that are no longer active. Try:
cache:example.com
(This can be used on sites that normally couldn’t be accessed or recently deleted

There are many other resources out there. Some are subscription databases, but many are free and just require a little time and ingenuity to be effectively utilized. I hope you enjoyed this guide. Feel free to post any tips or questions in the comments section.