I’ve noticed that attorneys are increasingly doing their own locates of witnesses on civil cases. The proliferation and ubiquitousness of these low-end products, on the internet, leads me to think that this is NOT a good promotional angle for investigators.

What are your observations?

http://www.peopledata.com/ seems to be getting a lot of visibility. This is not a very nuanced search, useful only for identifying people with unusual names, or in known locations. But they have a very appealing (to the inexperienced) interface.

Here’s how they describe their services:

PeopleData is the exclusive people search partner in Yahoo, AOL, MSN, InfoSpace, AT&T AnyWho, Earthlink, Dogpile and Excite etc. Over 1 million people search PeopleData every day. PeopleData was created in 2002 by the founder and original management team of US SEARCH, which led that company from its launch in 1994 to a 1999 NASDAQ IPO.