How To Use Google to Reverse Lookup a Phone Number For Free
If you receive a phone call from someone that you don’t know, it’s best to first perform a reverse phone number lookup using Google to find out who called before calling back. If it’s a spam caller, you won’t want to call the spammer back because you’ll likely be inundated with more calls.
Google is an incredibly powerful search engine which indexes millions of pages each day, and there’s a very good chance that Google will have information about the phone number who called you. There used to be a product called Google phonebook which made the process of finding a phone number on Google much easier, but after many abuse requests, this feature was removed back in 2010. But not to fear! There are still ways to use Google to perform reverse phone number lookups and get the information you need.
Google Reverse Phone Number Lookup Tutorial
To begin, first navigate to www.google.com and enter the entire phone number, including the area code. If you are entering an international number, be sure to include the country code as well. Use this guide to lookup the national carrier code if you are unsure.
- Enter the phone number into the search bar and press enter.
- Review the results to see if a match is found.
- If there are many results, refine the results using quotes
How do I refine my search results?
Google has the ability to refine your search if there are multiple results without the exact match of the phone number that you enter. In order to search for the exact phone number, enter the phone number you are searching for, surrounded by quotes (see below photo). This will return webpages with the exact phone number that you specify.
Be sure if you use this method to mix up the format of your phone number. For example, you could start with “555-123-1234”, and then do “5551231234”, or “(555)123-1234” etc, etc.
If your phone number belongs to a business, you’re going to be presented with much more information that you normally would with a regular search result. The search results will usually include the name of the business and their address.
Can you find a mobile phone number on Google?
Mobile phone numbers are not indexed by Google because the major carriers do not have a public database of phone numbers for their mobile users. If the owner of the mobile number posts their phone number online, then that may be indexed by Google when you perform a search, but otherwise you’re out of luck unless you use another method as outlined in the methods section of this site.
