With about 50% of the world population able to access the internet, there is now a much better chance to find someone free online. This is especially true if the person you are trying to locate lives in a country where internet usage is high. Generally, there are many ways to find people free online i.e. you can use various methods like people finders, address finders, white pages, reverse look ups, specific tips etc.

Often times you only have to know at least one thing about the person you are looking for and the rest is left on the finder to produce. This means the more basic information you have about the person the better your chances of finding him or her online. However, do not be discouraged if you don't have any background information about the person. The internet has become so sophisticated so much that anything is possible – at least almost anything.

Amongst the many free ways to find someone online, you can use what is called a reverse look up. You can use any of the information you have about the person, for example, if you have an email enter the email exactly as it is on the search bar such as Google, or if you have a phone number, try entering it and see what turns up. Google has great people search operators, the bphonebook and rephonebook, which can search a business and residential listings respectively.

Now, before you start sifting through billions of pages online you should have a clear plan - what we call a search strategy. Start by writing down as much as you know about the person you are looking for - the name, email address, surname, phone number, street address, residential address, social security number ,occupation, birthday etc. This should be more like a profile about hobbies, names, interests, friends, relatives, organization worked for, nicknames, schools attended if you want to do a classmate search and more. This will come in very handy in your search later on.

Once you have all that in writing, you can then start your search by locating people finders. Use the top search engines to help you generate the best ones to use. You can visit Google.com or your favorite search engine and search for people finders. It was mentioned earlier that Google offers great people finder tools, hence you can simply use it to enter the basic information you have about the person, that is, do a reverse finder strategy – enter what you know and leave it to the search engines to populate the data for you.

Another great way to find people free is through blogs. You can try to find out if the missing friend or person has a blog. This is because almost anyone who uses the internet on a continuous bases has a blog or has posted a message on one or more blogs. You can search for blogs using Technorati, a search engine that you can use to search blogs.

Don't forget the obvious ways – you can ask a mutual friend or colleague about the whereabouts of the person you are looking for. Think about people that might know this person and are more likely to be listed somewhere on the web. If you can at least find these mutual friends online, then you can use them to generate some leads about the person you are looking for. If you know the person's previous address, do visit there to ask the neighbors, they are usually very helpful in providing information about current street or residential addresses.

You should also look at widely available public sources and white pages to find the person's address free. There are some websites that offer free people finder tools and content to help you get reunited with your friend without paying a cent. Do look for people or person's contact info on these websites; Da Plus, Facebook, Myspace, Zaba search, ZoomInfo, friendster, Linkedin, soc.net-people. You should also try Wink, which is a free people search engine that searches about more than 150 million profiles. This site is one of the largest and one stop free people search for finding people on social network sites.