Friday, 21-Nov-2008 06:42:39 PST

Below are some links I've used to do my research on various persons and companies over the years. It's not complete by any imagination, but it's a good start. Also if you are buying or selling online, you might find my How To Protect Your Online Purchases page helpful. Also, if you are looking for contact information for PayPal, see our FAQs page.

U.S. Phone Number & Zipcode Lookups
Fast and simple U.S. Phone, Area Code and Zip Code Lookup. Gives city/state based on zip or area code input.

Reverse Lookup, plus many additional searching tools. (A little "busy" but useful.)

Another Reverse Phone Number Lookup and another Reverse Phone Number Lookup page. Gives name of person or business that the phone number is registered to. Fast and easy to use.

Yet another White Pages lookup tool.

Domain Name Lookups
To find who owns a domain name, aka website, use these tools. If one doesn't show the results, try one of the others. No one site has the information for every domain name. If you want to buy a domain name, click here.
Internic Domain Lookup Fast and easy, but only gives date of registration and basic info. If you need more detailed info, use the links below.

Geektools Whois Lookup
WebQuery Whois Lookup
Whois Source
"Better Whois"

Reverse IP Lookups

These below allow you to do even more researching, in particular, if you know the IP of the user, you can find where they are coming from and who's network they are using.
Arin Lookup - North & South America IP lookup
European IP Lookup
Asian IP Lookup

Miscellaneous Research Tools
Marketleap allows you to see how many other sites are linked to the site you are interested in. It's not a fool-proof system, but if a lot of other people are linking to them, it's probably a good sign. (Google is tough, so if you see 10 links on Google, that's decent. On MSN 20 links is pretty good. Whereas 100 on "AllTheWeb" is very easy to do.)

Alexa allows you to see a general idea of the amount of traffic a site gets. The theory being, good businesses and sites generate loyal visitors who will generate referrals, and thus more traffic. You can also see their feedback rating if one exists.

The WayBackMachine allows you to go back in time to see what a website used to look like.

Okay, back to our normal mode of flogging. ;-)