The Chronic Consumer

I graduated from high school more than 15 years ago, and have since lost touch with most of my classmates. Every once in a while when nostalgia strikes, I think of how nice it would be to reconnect with a few of my old buddies to exchange an email update or a phone call.

My generation (I’m 34) missed out on the MySpace and Facebook craze, so hardly anyone I know is on those sites. Plus, places like Classmates.com charge recurring membership fees to be able to view email addresses, which is something I don’t want to get into.

So I decided to try the online version of Net Detective to see if I could use their resources to help me find what I wanted. A one-year membership costs just $29 and permits me unlimited lookups during that time period. Not a bad deal — or so I thought.

Getting signed up and entering the site were both very quick, easy processes. Once in, I spent a bit of time looking around at all the different options available for my basic membership. I had access to:

• People Search (look up a person by name and city)
• Neighbor Search (look up an address to find info about neighboring properties)
• Search by Phone Number
• Business Search
• Social Security Validation (just checks to see whether or not an SSN is valid)

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In addition, the site offers articles about how to search for info the right way, as well as a guide to getting your hands on your FBI file (through the Freedom of Information Act) if you’re so inclined.

I’ve been using Net Detective online since the end of May, and I have to say that I’m not overly impressed by my experience.

First of all, the basic People Search function is flawed. For one thing, you MUST enter a state to search, which means you can’t search the entire U.S. at once. This is fine if you have a general idea of where the person lives, but if not, then you’re stuck doing a brute force state-by-state search until you come up with a hit.

A second problem with the People Search is that you can’t enter a city or zip code. This sucks for those times when you DO know a bit more about where the person lives, but don’t have an exact address. For example, say I’m looking for a John Smith and know he lives in Woodstock, IL. On Net Detective, I have to search for John Smith in ALL of Illinois, which of course returns hundreds of results that I then must sift through — whereas there might be only a couple John Smiths in a small town like Woodstock. So the option to enter a city/zip is really necessary here.

The Neighbor Search function is also faulty. In many cases, this search simply returns information about the property that you listed in your search — NOT the neighboring properties, which is what it’s set up to do. I’m not sure why anyone would need Neighbor Search anyway (I was just checking to see what it was), but I still think it should actually work properly.

And finally, the search results that I’ve gotten from Net Detective haven’t been anything that I couldn’t come up with by simply using the Google White Pages or Yahoo! People Search. Basically, if I can’t find a person on Google or Yahoo, I won’t find them with Net Detective either. If I can find them with Google or Yahoo, then yes, they will be on Net Detective — but what’s the point of that? The only difference I can see is that Net Detective sometimes gives a more detailed address history, especially if the person you’re looking for has held several addresses in the same state.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend purchasing a membership to Net Detective. Although they say they use more powerful tools than free online searches, that has not been consistent with my personal experience. I say save your money by sticking to the free people searches!