Typically, when you recall someone you haven't spoken to in awhile or need to contact an old friend who you don't have a number for, you simply go to the phone book and look up their name. These days most people do not even take up room in their living spaces with the wasteful paper phone books, but prefer to visit internet pages containing the same information and look it up much quicker.
Yet things happen in most people's lives where they have a phone number and need to determine who it belongs to. Old style phone books are designed on the knowledge of the name of the person you need to reach, and therefore are useless. With cell phones being so commonplace these days it gets even more complicated since there isn't a cell phone phone book accessible to the community as we have with standard home phones. Apparently, technological advances have made another sort of number directory necessary.
Reverse phone lookup functions exactly what its name suggests: it reverses the method in which you usually use a number listing. Rather than browsing for a name to locate a number or address, you use a phone number to locate the name or address of whoever the number may be registered to.
A lot of people do not even know this is possible, but with the existance of reverse phone lookup services it is now widely used by many businesses. It is also on the rise with people who find themselves interested in a phone number for whatever reason. It is a more modern form of the phone book that is likely to eliminate the demand for phone books in the future.
If you are receiving too many disturbing calls, whether they are childish hang ups, disturbing pranks, or even solicitations or collection services who don't reveal who they are but call nonstop, you can discover just who is making the calls by tapping into one of these websites.
You can check out yellowpages.com and access a limited reverse phone lookup website for very basic information or for listed home phone numbers, but there are two categories of information that cannot be found through any other means other than a more detailed directory.
- * If you have a number but no additional information and want a name.
- * If you have a cell phone or an unlisted residential number and want to find a name, address, or other information. Whitepages.com will not help with this type of information because it is not equipped with the information you are searching for.
Reverse phone lookup services spend quite a bit of time compiling information, keeping it as updated as possible, and saving it all in an organized directory so that it may be quickly used by consumers whenever needed.
Much of this information retrieved is not that simple to find and some of it they have to pay for in advance. For example, a legitimate, well maintained directory will have to purchase numbers from cell phone companies for updated listings of phone numbers. As with any business, it is understandable that you will have to pay a nominal fee to gain access to their listings.
The deal about the fee is it should be small and fair, for the most part around a dollar or so for a single phone number lookup and around fifteen bucks for more long term access to the |listings|directory|service}. Any service that demands a large fee for limited information retrieved should be avoided.
There are too many valuable websites available to throw away time and money on incomplete services, so be certain they actually have the information you need before giving them your money.