Today, the majority of people are confident that we can find pretty much any information we need and for any given reason by using search engines like Google. And with so much information out there, it’s often simple to find what you need. However, search has gotten even more advanced, and reverse search is a good option to consider if you need to dig a little deeper or want to find specific information that is hard to detect when sifting through thousands of Google search results.
How Does Reverse Search Work?
The reverse search involves internet searches that are made using files, media, and other information aside from general text queries. For example, you could use an audio file to conduct a reverse search for a song using an app like Shazam, or use Nuwber to find public information on somebody using their phone number or email address even if you don’t know their name. There are various reverse search tools available to help you find what you’re looking for.
Reverse Image Search
Reverse image search has been around for a while, and it is a pretty useful tool to use if you want to check the authenticity of somebody’s social media profile or check that you’re not being catfished on an online dating site. Simply upload the photo that you have into the tool, and it will search the internet in order to find any place where that photo appears. It is easily showing you if your new date has actually pulled their profile photo off Pinterest and doesn’t actually look like that at all. But checking out if people used their actual photo is just one possible application of this method. We should probably make it clear that reverse searching images are the most common application of this type of internet search.
Pretty much any picture posted online can be tracked on the internet, and there are many factors that are taken into consideration when the search is done, from the shape of the picture to the colors of the actual image. But what is more important from how it works is regarding the results we can obtain with it. Finding out if someone is using their real picture is just one of them. If we have a picture of someone, let’s say a celebrity whose name we can’t remember.
It is also possible to search their name with that image, but it is not just about people, as one can find objects and buildings with images. Can’t remember the name of some type of food? Search it with a picture. Some building looks familiar to us, but we can’t really place it, simply ask Google with a photo. People tend to be surprised by how much information we can obtain this way.
Usernames
Reverse searching for a username can be a handy device if you want to find a person on social media. Many people tend to stick to the same or a similar username when signing up for services like Twitter or Instagram, so if you’ve got their username for one social media site, you can simply use it to find them on others. Even though people mostly use this technique to find internet celebrities other profiles or connect with a long-lost friend, there are actually many possible situations where this method may be helpful.
Audio
Heard a song that you like, but you can’t remember the title or who the artist is? The good news is that you can use an app like Shazam to seek an audio clip and find that catchy tune whose name is on the tip of your tongue, but it just keeps slipping away from your grasp. No matter what app we pick in the end, they are all quite easy to use, so it shouldn’t be long before we can share the song with all of our friends.
Phone Numbers
If we have accepted a call from a number that we don’t recognize, a reverse search can be a convenient way of finding out exactly who it was. People search services allow you to search for a phone number and find out useful information such as the name of the person to who the phone number is registered, for example. Naturally, finding out who is calling us this way can have various levels of importance. If you just forgot what the person’s name is or if someone is prank calling you, that’s one thing. But sometimes, someone could actually be threatening us and endangering our safety. In those cases, it is a vital piece of information we can share with the police.
IP Addresses
There is a lot that we can learn from IP addresses. But to get this crucial data, we will need to use the right reverse search tool. Whether we are trying to find out who owns an IP address that has accessed something without authorization or wants to find out more about our own IP address, the right reverse search tool can help us decode the address and get the information we require. Since we live in a world where technology is so important, having an email address of a person is as important as it used to be to know where someone lives. So finding that email that we really need can be of extreme importance.
Home Addresses
If you have somebody’s home address, you can reverse search it on a people search service to discover more about the person who lives there or the organization that is set up there. That can be a good tool to take advantage of if you want to run a background check on somebody by looking up public criminal records, for example. So there are a lot of situations where this knowledge might prove significant to us.
As we have seen, there are many ways we can utilize reverse search. In a way, once someone starts using this method of searching, it just becomes another part of the way we use the internet. It doesn’t matter if we use words or pictures the end result can still be a crucial piece of information for us.
