This is the first of a three-part look at nearly 20 free or nearly free search sites aimed specifically at finding information on people by mining not only the Web but also social networking sites, archives and, to some degree, public records sites.

In this post, we'll look at 123people, CVGadget, iSearch and LinkedIn.

The bottom line: No one offers everything available on a person, but taken together they paint a detailed portrait of an individual. Add more traditional resources, such as property and court records, and even more details emerge.

Where we've been
Back in the day when information was mostly on paper, the process was labor intensive but straightforward and usually involved the newspaper morgue, city directories and a trip to the courthouse or maybe the library.

In the Internet's “early” days it meant cruising around using protocols, such as “Gopher,“ “Archie,” “Veronica” and “Jughead,”
and maybe finding some academic papers, but not much personal information.

Then came Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser. It's kinda scary to remember that Mosaic was released to the public just 17 years ago when there were—count 'em—only about 500 http servers, according to a contemporaneous article I found using a search engine.

Search engines, of course—the first well-known one was AltaVista—sparked a paradigm shift that changed everything. Google, with its ranking algorithm, sparked another one. And yet another occurred with the rise of blogging and social networking.

The scope
This review does not include Google or Yahoo search or their news aggregators Google News or Yahoo News. (Do not think, by the way, that one search engine is pretty much the same as another. On a search for "neil reisner," Google finds 1,350 listings while Yahoo finds 2,360.) This article also doesn't look at Facebook, which is worthy of an extensive post by itself.

It also doesn't include ProQuest, a fee-based service that provides extensive newspaper archives among many more offerings. (Hint: ProQuest is expensive, but it's often available at no charge through public libraries. Get a library card!)

And, it doesn't include fee-based data brokers such as Choicepoint or Accurint, both recently eaten by LexisNexis, or Intelius, which itself is eating competing brokers. Fee-based brokers can provide information on past addresses, national property records and potential relatives that free services may not.

The sites reviewed here are free or nearly free. Some are well known, some not so much. And some are thinly disguised come-ons for fee sites, most often Intelius, but even these may provide useful information. And, obviously, if the person you're looking for has no Web presence, they won't provide much at all.

Don't forget that most of these sites permit searching by keyword. So it's often possible to use them to find sources in particular interest groups, particularly for such typically difficult-to-penetrate groups as Indian tribes.

One more note: I need to tip my hat to research gurus Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota, Margot Williams of The New York Times, Kelly Guckian of the San Antonio Express-News and the late and much-missed Liz Donovan of The Miami Herald, from whom I've learned so much.

The Challenge
To test these sites, we'll look for information on the person I know best: me. How much information does each of these sites reveal, how accurate is it and how granular? Some things should be easy: I'm a journalist, and I teach journalism at Florida International University. I live in Florida; I speak at IRE/NICAR conferences and workshops. But will these resources provide past addresses or my birthday? Will they tweak out my involvement in the Jewish community? Do they have my wife, who uses a different last name than I do, or my daughters? Will they reveal the not-so-secret fact that I followed the Grateful Dead around for better than 20 years? And how well do they distinguish between this Neil Reisner, who lives in Hollywood, Fla., and the Neil Reisners who live in Melbourne, Fla., Seattle and Las Vegas.

123people (www.123people.com)
123people is among the best sites. But it's broad, not deep, and strangely inconsistent. It found 14 pictures, none of which were me, and my work e-mail. But my personal e-mail turned up only sometimes, kind of like the magician's "Now you see it, now you don't."

There were links to 27 Web sites, including my site, some IRE tipsheets, a profile and a question I asked about the Joomla content manager. It found 12 blogs, including this one and that of WNYC, NPR radio in New York, where I posted a comment during a show on the Grateful Dead. There were articles in the New York Times and the New York Post where I got tag lines. Other documents included items indicating some of what I do at FIU and hinting at Jewish involvement. It also listed my public LinkedIn profile and a MySpace profile I haven't used in years. Finally, it listed several phone numbers, none of which are mine but belong to other Neil Reisners around the country.

CVGadget (www.cvgadget.com)
CVGadget is among the better-organized sites. It provides a simple list of the sites it searches and shows how many hits it finds on each. But don't take those numbers seriously; they seem to be sort of random listings. For example, it shows 293 Google hits but displays only about a dozen until you click through and get the 1,350 you should. It searched Google images, but the only thing it found is a caricature of me and that only if you clicked through to the broader results. It found only a few documents and one result on Google News, but that one just a week old and containing the city in which I live, along with my eldest daughter's name, age and summer camp. Two good results showed up from ZoomInfo (more on that site later) and a few blogs, but not my LinkedIn or Facebook profiles.

iSearch (www.isearch.com)
iSearch is owned by Intelius and to that extent its purpose is to drive users to its fee-based parent. That said, it turns up multiple tidbits by its own self. iSearch uncovers 15 profiles for "neil reisner" in Florida; 14 are me and one is the Neil Reisner who lives in Melbourne.

Many of the 14 are duplicates or near duplicates, mostly containing a couple of dozen Web hits, including my résumé, some FIU class material, a profile on the FIU news blog and the like.

But then, though full of inaccuracies, it gets better. It has me working as programming president at Temple Sinai of Hollywood, which is wrong. But I am a member there, I did hold that office as a layperson, and there are plenty of folks there who know me. I'm listed as both 55 (wrong) and 56 (right, until early September) and that I'm a Virgo (right). That's pretty close and would help someone home in on me, as opposed to the Melbourne Reisner who's in his 40s.

Other listings have my correct address and demographics of my ZIP Code; that I worked at The Miami Herald (listing 30 associates whom I've never met). It has me educated at FIU where I teach but didn't attend, but correctly shows degrees from UCLA and Columbia University.

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)
LinkedIn is kind of a non-social social networking site. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn doesn't offer constant updates of life's trivialities. It's not the place you'll find out that your high-school sweetheart is making peanut butter sandwiches for lunch or that watching "Rent" for the tenth time still brings your brother-in-law to tears. LinkedIn is for professional networking only, but, depending on how much a LinkedIn member permits to be public, it offers detailed looks at what people say about themselves. And you don't have to sign in to view it. My LinkedIn public profile offers pretty much my whole CV, including a summary of what I say about myself, a complete job history and my education. Register as a member, and you see more. You also can click on a link to e-mail me. LinkedIn's keyword search functionality also makes it a great way of finding expert sources.