Some of these are more US centric, but you never know what info they are harbouring. While the ‘long gone’ might not be found, descendants could be.
Zabasearch is a fantastic search tool that focuses on finding only data related to individual people (names, addresses, phone numbers). You can use Zabasearch as a tool when you’re trying to find someone online, or simply as a way to verify an address.
How do I search for someone on Zabasearch?:
Just enter in the first and last name of the person you’re looking for, and the state if you know it (Zabasearch only works for United States-centered searches at this time).
With the tidbit that you’ve typed in, your search results bring back a variety of information, including:
Addresses
Property information
Verification of zip code
Phone number
Month of birth
This is the free information that you’ll get as part of your search results.
ZoomInfo takes searching for people on the Web to a whole new level; by using a combination of various technologies to crawl the Web (Web sites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings, etc.), ZoomInfo organizes all the information about people into a readable, sensible format – profiles that can also be searched within ZoomInfo by corporate headhunters.
Type in who you’re looking for into ZoomInfo and you’ll potentially come back with a lot of information that leads to other information: i.e., links that show you where else that person is on the Web (that’s IF they have a presence online. If the person you are looking for doesn’t get on the Web much, this isn’t going to do you much good.).
Wink is a people search engine that focuses not only on traditional search engine results, but social community profiles as well. Type as much as you can into Wink’s search boxes: full name, location, etc., and see what you can come up with.
If the person you’re looking for has done anything on the Web, PeekYou should be able to pick it up.
For example,Peekyou enables you to search for usernames across a variety of social networking communities. For instance: say you would like to learn more about the person who uses the handle “I-Love-Kittens”; you can use PeekYou to see what else they might be doing on the Web under that username (most people use the same username across many different Web services, so you could potentially hit some major paydirt here!)
YoName will search across six different social communities (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo 360, and Friendster) to find what you’re looking for.
If you know your person’s email address, username at various forums, message boards, social communities, etc., first and last name or phone number, type this information into YoName’s search box and see what comes up.
123People is a people search engine that gives you a smorgasbord of information from all over the Web: links, documents, videos, email addresses, phone numbers, social networks, and a lot more.
Simply type your person’s name into the 123People’s search box and see what you can come up with; again, if the person you’re looking for is not active on the Web, you won’t be able to find much information here. Then again, if they have ANY sort of activity online, you should be able to find it with 123People
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
This site also has links to a number of US and Canadian libraries and universities.