It used to be that everyone had a standard phone in their home and locating a phone number or address simply required opening the phone book and finding the name. This has become more complicated now that cell phones are widely used and many people do not even have home phones, and if they do their number may be unpublished.

Even with the invention of caller ID on most home phones, a lot of numbers may show up without an identifying name and there are ways for callers to prevent their name from showing up. Reverse phone lookup services have stepped up to these changing times to provide a very useful service to modern phone users.

There are two typical uses for lookup services.

Locating Names

If you are receiving calls from someone and only a number comes up on your caller ID, or you need to identify cellular phone callers, reverse phone lookup services can help you find out the name registered to the phone number in question. Just by entering the phone number you will be able to identify whoever is responsible for the calls of concern.

People looking for such services include those who need to check up on a number frequently calling their spouse or teenager's cell phone, since there is no public directory for cell phone numbers. Others may use this when they want to find a name connected to a home phone that may be unlisted. Anytime you have a number but don't know who it belongs to, a reverse phone lookup website can assist you.

Finding Addresses

The other typical use is to identify an address for someone, whether you know their name or not. Once you find the information connected with a specific phone number most services will deliver other sorts of information as well, such as the address of an landline or an address associated with a cell phone number.

This may not be a common need for some people, but it does have its uses in some situations. Such as a parent needing to track down a teenager who has run off or has not returned home long after curfew. If they can get access to numbers from the teenager's bedroom or cell phone a reverse phone lookup could quickly tell them addresses and names of places the child may be at that time.

Other situations may be searching for addresses to mail out party invitations to your child's peers. If you have the phone number you can access their address and easily deliver the invite without calling or tracking down other busy family.

These services can also deliver access to other various types of data, like income brackets and address histories, and one site even gives a map with an estimated pinpoint of the most current location.

There will be a minor fee for any legitimate reverse phone lookup directory, but if your business or personal life demands certain data it is money well spent in the end. The fee is unavoidable because this sort of information is not easy or completely free to research, pull together, and protect, so issuing it as needed to consumers such as you must also collect a fee to cover these working expenditures.

There probably will never be a phone book for cellular numbers, and even if they were compiled most likely many of the numbers would be unlisted as is the case with many home phone numbers right now. The only way to obtain access to such phone numbers is to give a small fee either to do a one time phone number search or to join a lookup service if you will be using the directory long term.