The invisible/deep web is full of information that you can't find on the regular/surface web. This means that a normal search engine is not always enough to find information about someone.

Below are the best tools and tips for finding people on the deep web that I have collected. You can use these to find someone you have lost contact with, to investigate an individual deeply, and so on.

If the person you are looking for once created a website or has information that you know was on the web, but the content has since been removed, you can look up that website using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It's a database of hundreds of billions of pages archived from 1996 to the present.

This is a good way to see hard-to-find information, because snapshots of websites — including many that are no longer live on the Internet — are archived here. I've used Wayback Machine successfully to dig up old blog pages that I can't find anywhere else.