Mike Wendland

Net Detective Comparison Review

How does Net Detective's people search facility compare to free search tools available on the Internet?

We'll search for Mike Wendland, a technical writer for the Detroit Free Press.

Mike wrote an article comparing Net Detective with other search facilities such as switchboard.com and anywho.com.

Here are the actual results from a comparison I did on June 4, 2004.

Can Net Detective Find Mike Wendland?

Let's log into Net Detective and select the People Search facility:

Now in the People Search Facility we'll select to search by Name. Here we enter Mike's name and state into Net Detective's people search facility:

Notice I used "Michael" instead of "Mike" as a first name. Net Detective uses databases such as voting records, PO Box owners that have real names rather than nicknames.

Here are the results of our search:

Net Detective found three "hits". Let's look at each one:

This first one is not the Mike Wendland of the Free Press. But, notice that Net Detective can find PO Boxes from the public records.

But the second one is our real target:

The third Mike Wendland shows

What Can We Find for Free?

Sow, now let's compare what can be found on the Internet for free.

Let's look at Switchboard.com. We'll enter the same information as we gave Net Detective:

Switchboard finds only one Mike Wendland. In this case it's the "right" Mike Wendland.

Now lets look at Whowhere.com. Again we'll enter the same information as before:

This time we get two results:

Overview of Search Results

Search Tool	Number Found	Listed Household Residents	Listed Phone Number	Finds PO Box Holders
Net Detective	3	Yes	Yes	Yes
Switchboard.com	1	No	Yes	No
AnyWho.com	1	No	Yes	No
InfoSpace.com	1	No	Yes	No
WhitePages.com	1	No	Yes	No
WhoWhere.com	2	No	Yes	No
people.yahoo.com	2	No	Yes	No

This comparison tests only the People Search capabilities of Net Detective against free searches on the Internet. Net Detective can help you a many different ways.