The Original Internet White Pages

Phone Book
Internet white pages destroyed the printed phone book. ( Photo credit: Rich Anderson )

Whitepages.com was one of the original white pages sites for looking up people on the internet.

The site was launched in 1997, and it quickly became the online alternative to thumbing through bulky, printed phone books to find contact information on people and businesses. In fact, directory assistance sites like Whitepages.com are largely responsible for the virtual extinction of the bulky printed phone books that used to arrive with a thud on people’s doorsteps.

Unfortunately, free contact information on Whitepages.com isn’t as plentiful as it used to be. In the past, Whitepages was a great free way to find an address or phone number for a person, but good free contact information on Whitepages has become increasingly hard to find over the past few years.

To be fair, there are a number of reasons that this is the case. For one thing, people have moved away from landline phones to mobile cell phones. As a result, published phone number listings for landlines have plummeted; while unlisted phone numbers for mobile cell phones have skyrocketed.

Also, collecting, storing and offering contact information on people costs money. This valuable information can’t all be given away for free by sites like Whitepages.

As a result, Whitepages.com is now mostly a marketing funnel for the Whitepages Premium search service. Whitepages Premium is the fee-based people search service for Whitepages.com. Whitepages Premium also provides additional information on people, such as public records, email addresses, court records, property records and social media profiles.

Whitepages People Search

Whitepages still offers a free people search that you can use to find information on someone by full name and location. However, any free search results that you find will likely be limited to the person’s age range, street address, city, state and zip code.

Unfortunately, finding a current phone number for someone on Whitepages is becoming a rare event, especially if their primary or only phone number is a cell phone. Unlike landlines, cell phone numbers are largely unpublished and it costs companies like Whitepages money to buy this contact information. As a result, there is usually a fee to obtain a person’s cell phone number on the site.

Whitepages Reverse Phone Lookup

As with most people search sites, Whitepages offers a free way to do a reverse search for a residential or business phone number in the USA. This phone lookup was really great back when most people still had landline phone numbers. But in the age of cell phones this search has become increasingly unreliable.

Trying to search for a cell phone on Whitepages is almost a waste of time if you are trying to find a free listing for the person who owns it. However, if the phone number that you want to lookup is a landline number, then you may still be able to find some useful free results on Whitepages.

Whitepages.com is also responsible for the popular caller ID app, Hiya, which automatically does a reverse phone search whenever someone calls your cell phone number. The Hiya caller ID app is available for both Apple and Android smartphones.

Whitepages Reverse Address Search

The good news is that it is still possible to do a reverse residential address search on Whitepages.com to find the people who live at the address. Listings for the address search are still decent and also show a Google map of the neighborhood as well as people who live near the address that you are searching for.

Whitepages Premium

As we mentioned before, Whitepages Premium is a subscription-based people and government records search that is meant for the general public. Whitepages Premium offers more detailed and current information on people than is available on the free Whitepages search.

In addition, the background reports that are available on Whitepages Premium can include a lot of additional public record information on a person.

Whitepages Pro

Whitepages Pro is also a subscription-based people and public records search, but it is aimed at businesses that need to run high-volume searches on people to verify customers and prevent identity fraud.

Whitepages Pro is used by a number of big name companies like Microsoft, American Airlines, Western Union and Priceline.