People-research guides

These guides are working methods for public-web people research. You can run every one of them without OneSearch: a name, a confirm step, original pages, and a stop line. The product is a faster brief when that method is already the job. It is not a substitute for confirmation, and it is not a background check.

Start with the confirm gate. A common name is not one person. Alex Chen and Maria Garcia are the identities we use on this site because they collide in public. If you cannot say which trail is the person you meant, you do not write a brief, a first note, or a first-call question. The collisions guide and the confirm guide are the same problem from two angles. Operators help you find public pages. Source verification is how you open the original before you use a fact in the room.

When to stop is written into each guide because teams skip it. Stop when two identities still fit. Stop when the public web is quiet and a thicker page would be fiction. Stop when the output would be used like a consumer report — hiring, tenant, credit, or insurance eligibility. OneSearch is not a consumer reporting agency and is not FCRA-compliant. The classification method is people search is not a background check. The short policy is FCRA and legal use.

The rest of the cluster is the job after confirm: research someone before a meeting, write a first-call brief, and keep citations attached. Audience pages under Who OneSearch is for apply the same method to recruiting, founders, sales, and research. The product page without an audience frame is people search. This hub is the methods index. The cards below are the pages, not a reading list you have to finish.

The guides

Each guide includes a stop line: when not to proceed, and when this is not a screen.

• Research someone before a meeting

  A 12-minute public-web method to walk in briefed — without inventing what is not there.

• People search is not a background check

  Where public-web research stops and FCRA-regulated screening begins.

• Confirm the right person

  How to disambiguate common names before you write a brief or a message.

• Google operators for people research

  Documented operators and query patterns for finding public pages about a person.

• Write a first-call brief

  What to pull from the public web before a first conversation — and what to leave out.

• When the public web is quiet

  What to do when a name returns almost nothing — without inventing a dossier.

• Verify a people-research claim

  A checklist for opening the original page before you use a fact in the room.

• Common-name collisions

  Why Alex Chen is not one person, and how to stop the wrong brief.