Normally, when you are thinking about someone you haven't spoken to in awhile or need to contact an old friend who you don't have a phone number for, you retrieve the phone book and find their name. Nowadays, most people do not even take up room in their office or homes with the chunky paper phone books, but prefer to visit websites which have the same information and look it up much quicker.

Yet circumstances occur in in everyday life where they have a phone number and want to know who it is connected to. Old style phone books are designed around knowing the name of the person you want to reach, and therefore won't help much. With cell phones being so popular these days it gets even more difficult since there isn't a cell phone listing accessible to the community as we have with standard home phones. Obviously, technological advances have made another sort of number listing essential.

Reverse phone lookup functions just what the name states: it reverses the way you normally use a number listing. Rather than looking up a name to get to a number or address, you look up a phone number to retrieve the name or address of whoever the number may be listed under.

A lot of people do not even know this is available, yet with the development of reverse phone lookup websites it is now common by many businesses. It is also growing with individuals who get interested in a number for for various reasons. It is a new sort of phone book and may very well eliminate the demand for paper phone books in the future.

If you are bothered by a high volume of disturbing calls, whether they are annoying hang ups, rude pranks, or even telemarketers and collection services who don't leave a message but call nonstop, there is a way to discover just who is connected to the calls by utilizing one of these services.

You can go to yellowpages.com and find a limited reverse phone lookup directory for very basic information or for published home phone numbers, but there are two categories of information that cannot be found by any other source besides a more detailed directory.

1. * If you have a phone number but no additional information and must find a matching name.
2. * If you have someone's cell phone or an unpublished landline number and need a name, address, or other information. Yellowpages.com is not going to help with this type of information because it is not updated with the information you want.

Reverse phone lookup services put out a lot of time obtaining information, double checking that it is as accurate as possible, and storing it all in an organized listing so that it may be quickly utilized by consumers on demand.

Much of this information retrieved is not that simple to obtain and some of it must be paid for in advance. For instance, a reputable, accurate directory will have to purchase numbers from cell phone companies for updated listings of phone numbers. As with any business, it is to be expected that you will have to hand over a nominal charge to have access to their listings.

The deal about the fee is it should be small and fair, typically about a dollar or so for a single phone number lookup and around fifteen bucks for more long term subscription to the |listings|directory|service}. Any site asking for a high charge for limited information delivered should be avoided.

There are too many worthwhile directories available to throw away time and money on incomplete services, so make sure they actually have the information you want before handing over hard earned money.