“Hello?”
“Hi Doug! My name is Mike Tait and I’m with ComTechCorp Inc, and I have a few questions for you.”
“Actually, I’m eating at the mome-”
“Great! We love food too. Why I ate some food yesterday, as a matter of fact!”
“Is that right.”
“Cool if I call you Mr. Food, Doug?  Are you really getting the most out of your wireless conne…”
“I have to go…wash my…car. Or dog. Bye.”

There’s no doubt about it: telemarketers are annoying. And not only do they call at all hours of the day, but they often call from hard-to-trace (usually toll-free) numbers.

That’s where we come in. Since many of you are already using Spokeo’s reverse phone search capability in order to find information on those irritating unknown numbers, we decided it was time to add a new feature for all us victims of unwanted calls. Now you can simply enter the number (i.e. 1-800-555-5555) into the search bar and you’ll be taken to a page where you can file a complaint to help identity and report intrusive callers. Some numbers will have multiple reports filed by other users, who often possess info on where the calls are coming from and how to stop them.

No other people search site with reverse phone capabilities has anything like it. We hope it helps you find a little peace and quiet.

Spokeo Mobile is the perfect way to search people while you’re on the go. Whether you’re on the bus or in line at the movies, Spokeo Mobile puts our powerful name search, reverse phone search, email search and username search features right in the palm of your hand. While Spokeo has been available on your mobile phone for some time now, our engineers and designers have worked hard to implement some big design improvements to ensure the most satisfying user experience possible, including a new streamlined interface and design that automatically adjusts and rearranges itself according to vertical or landscape modes.

We’ve also fine-tuned Spokeo’s mobile site to work on a wide variety of both mobile phone and tablet devices, including but not limited to iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Honeycomb tablets. Considering that experts are predicting that mobile internet users will outnumber desktop internet users within the next five years, we thought it was high time to make those improvements. We think you will be very pleased with the results – now fire up the iPhone and start searching!

Do you want to figure out who that mysterious missed call is from? Did you get some digits from the club last night but can’t remember her name? Do you have your friend’s phone number but need their address?

Yes?

Well, what are you waiting for? Start searching: http://www.spokeo.com/reverse-phone-lookup

While that’s pretty darn easy, our search engine also allows you to add the city after a name (i.e. "John Smith Los Angeles"). But since we’re all about helping you find the person you are looking for in record time, we’ve decided to make it even quicker and easier than that. Now when you enter the first and last name in the search bar, feel free to add just PART of the city as well and we’ll do the rest!

For example, type "John Smith Los," and Spokeo will generate a personalized suggestion box with a list of cities ranked based on your location. So if you’re in California and searching "John Smith Los" we’ll suggest "Los Angeles" first, while if you’re in Texas we might suggest "Los Fresnos" instead. Once the list appears you can simply click or use the arrow keys to select the desired city in the suggestion box and you’re good to go! We call it our "location auto-suggest" feature, but since that’s sort of an awkward name you can just call it "Time Saver 5000." You’re gonna love it!

"Here’s just some of the information we have on the person you’ve searched!," he’d exclaim. "Would you like to see more, madame?" (so polite!).
"Yes, I would. I’d like to see the full report. And don’t call me madame. My name is Gary."

He was a good kid with good intentions, but unfortunately he got in the way. Most of our users like Gary would end up clicking to see the full report anyway, no matter how friendly he was, and that’s understandable. You come to Spokeo expecting to find information, and you expect to get that information in a timely fashion. So it is with a heavy heart that we have decided to bid adieu to Info-Bubble. We think you’ll agree that this change is for the best. You are now one-step closer to finding the person you’ve been looking for.

-I’ll start with the one you are looking at: our new blog! We’ve been angling for a new blog design for a while now. Oh sure, the old layout was fine and all, but it always felt a little, I don’t know, flat. Sterile. Plain. Anodyne. Somnifacent even! (Oh no he didn’t!) And that’s a shame, because Spokeo is anything but. This new design is bold and fresh, and it packs in a whole lot of posts on one page for your viewing pleasure.

-Our Privacy page, which allows anyone to to remove their listing, has been transformed. What was formerly a simple blank form now includes a helpful illustration of the different elements that make up a Spokeo listing (phonebooks, public social network profiles, real estate listings), so that you can see how we aggregate all that publicly-accessible data.

-We’ve also made some touch-ups to our Friends feature, making it easier than ever to see what your buddies are up to.

We like these new layouts a whole lot, and hope you do too. (A personal fave: the hedgehog peeking out from behind the blog. Man, that is some USDA Prime Certified Cute right there!)

I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.

Astrology has been around in one form or another for thousands of years, and remains popular as ever. People are fascinated by the idea that the stars and planets have an effect on their personality and future; We’ve all met someone who, moments after meeting us, will ask the eternal question: "What’s your sign?" Like Clarke, I’m a Sagittarius, which according to Astrology-Online means that I "have a positive outlook on life, [am] full of enterprise, energy, versatility, adventurousness and eagerness" (true!). It also says that I am "exacting, domineering and inconsiderate in the work place." Also true – everyone hates me here!

While I’m more of an extispicy man myself (I won’t decide on a pair of socks without consulting a sheep’s liver!), even the most hardened skeptic will admit to taking a peak at his horoscope now and then. Astrology can be a lot of fun, and, as you may have gathered, we here at Spokeo don’t like being left out of the fun. This started us thinking: if every major newspaper and magazine in the country gets to feature an astrological section, why can’t we? And at that moment, with Sirius and Orion in perfect alignment and Venus gliding into the fifth house, the Spokeo Astrological Reading section was born!

This is the latest component of our name search and phone search features. Simply type in a name or phone number, pull up the desired listing, click on "Astrological Reading" section in the Table of Contents and you will see that person’s zodiac sign (Western and Chinese) along with their personality traits and compatibility ratings. See if you and your neighbor are celestial matches, or if being born in the Year of the Monkey explains why he wears shoes in the pool.

Try it now!

The latest redesign is subtle, but effective. You will notice that our homepage has been lightly altered. The logo is smaller, but just as purdy.The fonts are sleeker, dare I say…sexier? (No, I won’t say that, as that’s really creepy.) One of the more substantial changes involves our name search, specifically the way our system narrows down the search for you. For the most part, our name search function works the same as before: when you type "John Doe" into the search bar, you are prompted to narrow the search by selecting the state. After you select the correct state,  the menu on the left will now display a list of cities and areas for you to choose from. Previously, our system gave you a list of bolded "John Doe"s with the addresses in smaller font under the name. This latest tweak is simply to help you find the person you are looking for faster, by emphasizing the general area of residence. We think you’ll like it a lot.

Another small addition/improvement relates to our email search. As you know, when you type an email address into Spokeo, our search engine scours dozens upon dozens of social networks to locate matching profiles. These profiles can range from Twitter feeds, to Facebook profiles, to Amazon wishlists and everything in between. While Facebook and Twitter may dominate the field, there are a lot of social networks out there, and it can be confusing to keep track of them all. To help acquaint you with some of the networks that may be unfamiliar to you, we’ve added short descriptions of them on the email search page. After you’ve searched the email address, simply hover the mouse over the network name and a small info-bubble will appear with a helpful summary of what the network is, and what it does. You’ll soon be impressing friends and colleagues at parties with your encyclopedic knowledge of Wretch!

Well, sort of. It’s not a Harrison Tang-size makeover by any means, but it is a change. Remember last week when I blogged about our new and improved phone search page? (No?! How dare you?). Well, we have gone ahead and extended this design concept to our email search and name search as well. While this is by no means a radical design change, it’s certainly an improvement.

The basic idea behind the redesign is simple. Spokeo offers different kinds of search options: name search, reverse phone search, reverse email search and (most recently) username search. In the past each of these different types of lookup each had its own look and feel. We eventually realized that this made our website look inconsistent; after all, a website that has such a different design for every page is not a user-friendly website. That’s why our designers have been hard at work unifying the layout of our website, so that you can browse with speed and ease.

It looks pretty, too. Be sure to check out the Table of Contents feature (located to the left of the listing), which allows you to jump to the section that most interests you with a click of the mouse. It’s a lot faster than scrolling. It’s safer, too: did you know that scrolling is responsible for an estimated 78% of Carpal tunnel-related finger injuries? I sure didn’t, until I completely made it up just now! The point stands: Spokeo not only values your feedback, we value your index finger as well.

One helpful piece of advice had to do with the design of the different types of listings. Spokeo offers several different types of searches at this time: name search, reverse email search, reverse phone search and username search. In the past, the listings for each of these lookups had a individual design and look; this was not only designed to reflect the fact that each type of search will generate different types of information (i.e. social network profiles for the reverse email search, address for the phone search etc.), but also to prevent confusion for users trying to parse the varied kinds of data. In other words, we wanted to make it very clear what search you had just performed.

What we’ve realized from your feedback, however, is that this can actually be a source of confusion as well: each new search meant learning a new way to navigate the page. We’ve taken this into account, and are happy to introduce our brand spanking new phone search page! If you take a look you’ll see that it more closely resembles the name search listing, complete with information regarding age, address, education, hobbies etc. We think the new phone search (complete with table of contents) page looks pretty sweet, and we urge you to try it post-haste!

Because Spokeo is continually trying to provide a fuller, more thorough search experience, we have tried to unify the look of our website while integrating the data from the varied kinds of listings. This entails making the connections between the different types of search listings so that you get a more well-rounded view of the person you are searching.

As always, let us know what you think!