Researchers often need to find a phone number for a person or business. You may have any number of legitimate reasons for needing this information; you Figure 5-5:
The search using the link:
operator returns more than 1,700 pages that have linked to the Research buzz site.
might need to confirm something your research has found, talk to a back-ground expert, or maybe you’ve been asked to find financial information that involves a person or business.
The Google phone number operators currently only work for the United States (not for Canada or the rest of the world). So if you are looking for a phone number that’s outside of the U.S., you are out of luck, at least with these operators; you can find many phone numbers in the U.S. and around the world with another type of Web search.
Google provides the three operators shown in Table 5-3 to locate the phone number of a person or business.
Table 5-3 Finding a Phone Number
Operator What It Does Example
bphonebook: Locates business bphonebook: Google CA phone numbers
phonebook: Locates business phonebook: D Smith NY and residential
phone numbers
rphonebook: Locates home rphonebook: Larry Page CA phone numbers
To search for a phone number, choose the operator you want to use (refer to Table 5-3) depending on whether you are looking for a business number, a residential number, or (in some circumstances) both. The phonebook: opera-tor needs to be the first term in the search. You must include some geographic information when you conduct the search. You don’t have to include the state, but if you include just a city name, you may end up with listings from several states. Obviously, the more specific you are, the more likely you are to come up with the phone number you want.
Entering a city and state give you more pinpointed results than just entering a state. Also, you don’t need to include a comma between the name of the person and the geographical information (however, adding a comma doesn’t affect results, so if you are mindlessly accurate with punctuation, don’t worry).
For example, a search for rphonebook: Larry Page CA
returns a number of listings for people named Larry Page living in California.
Because a search for a common name like Larry Page generally yields more than one result, you may not know which residential number belongs to Larry Page, the cofounder of Google. Perhaps none of them do. You wouldn’t know for sure without trying the number and speaking to someone at the other end of the line. I’m certainly not going to bother Larry, or anyone else, without a good reason, and neither should you!
This leads me to some inherent limitations in the Google phonebook search.
These include the following:
Google cannot return unlisted numbers.
You won’t get meaningful results unless you include a state, which can be written out (California)or entered via its two-letter abbreviation (CA).
If a name is common, a phonebook search returns many phone numbers.
Particularly with residential searches, being sure which result goes with the person you’re interested in finding can be difficult. For example, searching for
phonebook: D Smith NY
returns roughly 30 business and 600 residential listings. If you know a town (or city), you can include this along with the state, for example:
phonebook: D Smith albany ny
Even this search yields 36 results — too many to make a guess. Pretty much the only way you can pick between these numbers is if you already know the street address of the person or business you are looking for.
Multiple phone numbers are often returned for a single business. For example, searching for
bphonebook: Google Ca
returns four different numbers. As the Ghostbusters say, “Who ya gonna call?”
There can be inaccuracies in the underlying telephone directory data that Google uses. For example, my own listings in the Google phone directories are inaccurate. These errors and omissions can make it harder to find specific people or businesses.
You can find a list of sites with directories for finding people and phone num-bers by searching Google with the keywords find person.Using the keywords find businessresults in sites that claim to locate (and provide information about) businesses.
If you really hit a dead end, there are also a number of services on the Web that will help you locate, and find information about, a person or business for
a fee. You can easily find these services by looking at the sponsored links when you do a find personor find businesssearch on Google. Caveat emptor!
It’s up to you to investigate these services before you try them out.
Google also supports reverse phone lookups. This means that if you have a U.S. phone number, you can just enter it as a search into Google.
With a reverse phone lookup, Google shows you the name and address asso-ciated with the number. (Figure 5-6 shows you the results of a reverse lookup for 408-363-0186, one of the numbers I found for Google.)
Reverse lookups are, of course, useful if you have a phone number but lack other information. You can also use the information provided by the reverse lookup to eliminate possible numbers. (Because the Google mothership is docked in Mountain View, and the 408-363-0186 number resolves to San Jose, it is probably not a primary Google phone number.)
If you really want to find a business’s phone number, the easiest way to do so would probably be to look through the Contact Us section of the company’s Web site.
In addition, you can use reverse lookups to get more information about the person or business associated with the number. (For more information about a variety of numbers you can enter directly into the Google search box, see Chapter 1.)