Once you find an unknown missed call in your caller ID, you may have one question: How may I find the owner of this number? If you are expecting an important phone call, you may want to make sure the caller is the person you are looking for, not an advertiser who just randomly makes harassing calls.
In this case, finding the owner of a phone number becomes very important.
You may try the following methods to see if you can find it out.
A very simple method is to enter the number into the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or MSN.
You can enter the phone number in different formats, such as (xxx)xxx-xxxx, or xxx-xxx-xxxx, or xxxxxxxxxx.
If you are lucky, you can instantly find the phone number associated with a name, the phone owner.
But it may also be possible that you find much information (such as a huge list of phone numbers) but couldn't find the owner information, or some irrelevant information, or just no result.
No matter what kind of result it will be, you can just try it because you will lose nothing, and you may get it instantly for free.
But there is still another issue: You don't know if the information you get is updated.
If the search engines do not give you a successful result, you may try to use the free reverse phone search directory.
You may be lucky enough to find out the owner information.
However, the free reverse phone search directory can't give the information as detailed as a paid service.
Also your search may return no result if the number belongs to a cell phone.
A free reverse phone lookup directory will not contain this information because the cell phone numbers are not available for them.
Even for a landline phone, sometimes the phone owner may pay some fee to let his number removed from a public list, so a free reverse phone lookup directory can't get this number.
You shall also consider this scenario when you are searching the free reverse phone lookup directory.
The most reliable method is to use the professional reverse phone search service.
Even though the cell phone numbers are not listed in the public phone directory, a professional reverse phone lookup company can access the in-house databases which contain these unlisted numbers.
You may need to pay to use this kind of service.
Fortunately, it is just a small amount of fee, and you can get the more accurate search results by using this way.
If you are seriously looking for the owner information of a phone number, it is highly recommended to use the professional reverse phone lookup site.
Their cross-database search can provide the accurate and updated results, and save you much time.