Every month the Internet For Lawyers' free Internet legal research newsletter delivers this kind of useful information to your e-mail inbox.

ThinkDirectMarketing.com offers a free "reverse look-up" function that supplies residence and business information based upon an address input by the searcher.

 

Users can search by "street name" and "street number" in one of the 50 states or District of Columbia or one of 12 Canadian provinces.

If searchers are not certain of the spelling of the street name or the city, the site also features "Begins With" or "Sounds Like" options for those search fields.

I typically use anywho.com or infospace.com for reverse look-ups when I know the phone number. This is one of the first free sites that I have encountered with a reverse address look-up. I was quite intrigued and so I searched for my own address--which happens to be alpha numeric (e.g. 1070A).

The search engine returned a response that it only searches numeric addresses. After dropping the alpha part of the address and typing just "1070," it still could not find my address. When I searched a friend's address, however, it returned with her name attached to the address, her phone number and a map to her home. Very useful.

Knowing that infospace.com did not have a reverse address fiunction, I visited the site anyway to see what else it could do in the "reverse" world. The closest they have to the reverse address look-up is a function that helps you find businesses closest to a specific address--type in the type of business you are seeking (e.g. restaurant) along with the address and you will get a list of nearby restaurants. Also very useful, but in a different way than ThinkDirectMarketing.