OT - Free phone number look up

Used to be, I could log onto yellow pages (dot com), Switchboard, lookup, Standeyo, or gosh knows how many sites.

Type in name and town, and I'd have a bunch of ad and phone. Now days, about five clicks later we get to the sign up screen (one look up for eight bucks, month for twenty bucks and.....) and they want money.

Any free sites these days? Google is paid site, now, too.

- . Christopher A. Young Learn about Jesus

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Reply to
Stormin Mormon
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These still work for me

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Reply to
Retired
411.com and whitepages.com seem to work OK. Switchboard worked for me.... sort of. First it didn't find a name or a business I was looking for. Then when I tried it again it said I needed to solve a captcha. But the same searches worked on the other two sites. (Which is odd. I think whitepages.com and switchboard.com are the same company.)

My results may vary because I don't enable script, cookies, 3rd-party ads, or iframes. I just see a very plain page, with the returns on a similarly plain page.

I think it's gotten more difficult in general, though. Most cellphones are not listed. A lot of people with landlines now pay not to be listed in order to stop spammers/scammers.

Reply to
Mayayana

I tried 411, which would not give me the phone number, kept jumping to another page, which was paid site. Did you actually try these before sending them to the list?

IIRC white and switch are the same company, and they both are paid sites.

Did you actually read my request, or are you just sending me the paid sites I already tried?

- . Christopher A. Young Learn about Jesus

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Reply to
Stormin Mormon

My problem is with REVERSE lookups. All the sites I've tried end up asking for money.

Fred

Reply to
Fred McKenzie

Don't seem to have this problem. Usually I just put persons name + phone into google to find it. Also use Zabasearch to get address and phone:

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I see 6 Christopher A. Young's in NY and all phones listed.

Reply to
Frank

I use

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I just went to 411.com and did a reverse lookup on my home phone. I got it no problem. Nothing asked me to pay. Now I do have lots of blocking addons.

Don.

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(e-mail link at home page bottom).

Reply to
Don Wiss

| IIRC white and switch are the same company, and they | both are paid sites. | | Did you actually read my request, or are you just | sending me the paid sites I already tried?

Why would you think that? I just described my results. Two out of three responders are telling you that we don't get asked to pay. Before you just assume we're idiots wouldn't it make sense to look into it?

I don't see ads and I don't see anything asking for money. I'm guessing, assuming that you don't have some sort of malware trying to scam you, that the difference is probably related to cookies and/or script. (For instance, you may be allowing a permanent cookie that's identifying you as a multiple repeat visitor. That's how the NYT works. If you allow session cookies at the NYT you can read as much as you like. The cookie is deleted when you close your browser, which restarts the count of allowed articles. If you allow no cookies you can't read anything. If you allow permanent cookies you can only read something like 20 articles per month.)

You might experiment with disabling script and cookies, perhaps in a secondary browser. If you normally enable them you should also know that you're allowing extensive spying and accepting a great deal of risk. Nearly all online attacks require script. (Even the common attacks using Flash or Java usually also require script.) I normally use Firefox with medium restrictions and the NoScript extension when I *really* have to enable script and interaction. For other sites I use Pale Moon, disabling all of it and blocking

3rd-party files. I don't have Flash or Java installed in the first place. Most sites work fine that way.

A quick look at switchboard.com shows ads from Amazon, OpenX, Yieldmanager and Google, tracking from Google, Scorecardresearch and Quantcast, as well as at least one cookie being set. And that's just the first level of sleaze. It's hard to know how many other players are getting in on the action. Just using a decent HOSTS file would save you from all of that junk. ....On the other hand, aren't you the guy who likes to celebrate capitalism, which you define as an Edenic state of affairs where companies all provide wonderful products at the lowest possible price. In that case, wouldn't you really prefer to pay up rather than act like a scummy socialist? :)

Reply to
Mayayana

| Also use Zabasearch to get address and phone: |

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Thanks. That looks good. I'd never heard of it before.

Reply to
Mayayana

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works for most listed, non-cell numbers. Cell and unlisted, not so much.

Reply to
Retired

I did a search for my name and my number in Zabasearch and I wasn't found (I knew I was lost). Though, my name is fairly common, other results where found, but not me.

Reply to
Meanie

As I did with Zabasearch, I also did with Superpages and searched for my name and number with no direct results of me.

Reply to
Meanie

Worked for me. Got name, address, age, relatives. Only asked for money for more information.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

I looked up someone with only a first initial and last name in Swtichboard. One listing had name (just first intial), no address, no age, no previous addrress, no known asscociations, but it did have his phone number, for free.

Reply to
micky

I thought 411 and switchboard were the same company! 411 tightened up on what they gave for free a month or three before swtichboard did.

Cellphones never were, were they?

They said a few years ago that someone was going to make a cell phone directory, but I don't think it happened. I'll bet too few people agreed to cooperate.

No need to pay. 31 years ago when I moved here, I let myself be listed but for an address I put in the suburb with a name that is 3 or 4 blocks from me, so people would know what general area I lived in. I must have been the first peson to do something like this, because when I got my first bill, the window envelope was addressed to me and that suburb name, no street address, and it had been returned to them, and they had had to put in an plain white hand-addressed envelope.

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Reply to
micky

i use that bur ftr, twice in the past 2 weeks, I've found three people on zabasearch who weren't on switchboard, and three people on switchboard who weren't on zabasearch.

That neither had as much as the other surprised me.

Reply to
micky

I know how to find you. You're the one in the Sluggo comic strip with the yellow and black striped knitted shirt

Reply to
micky

You can still get yourself taken out of zabasearch, and maybe others, but out means totally out. I want people to find my name and number, just not my address. If they want to come over here, they can call me first.

Reply to
barneymiller

Here in Canada we have

'Free People Search, Reverse Phone Lookup, Business Telephone Directory | Canada411.ca'

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and it'll do both reverse phone number look ups and reverse address look ups.

The problem is that it only uses the telephone listings of the companies that operate the land lines. With more and more people abandoning their land lines and using their cell phone for everything, these phone number look up sites are getting more and more useless. They don't have any cell phone listings in their data bases. And, these companies have to buy those data bases off the cell phone companies, so they want to charge for their services to recoup their costs.

Reply to
nestork

If people port their land line phone number to the cell, the listing will follow. Yellow even have me listed at a condo I sold 12 years ago. (land line number)

Reply to
gfretwell

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