When the Internet was first born there were very little, if any, search abilities. That fact slowly began to change and soon search engines, such as Yahoo, were born. Then websites that helped perform certain types of searches began to crop up.

Some of these sites helped with standard phone book like searches. The type of site that acted like a typical name indexed directory, where you entered a person name and the person’s phone number and address were returned. There were many of these sites like whitepage and 411. These sites still exist today, but now they have many, many more services than the standard paper-based phone book lookup.

Now these sites can do something called a reverse search where if you enter a phone number into the search parameter field the owner’s name and address will be returned within a matter of seconds. This phone trace service began with land lines as the data for land lines was fairly easy to gather from the local service providers and databases were fairly easy to keep up to date.

The sites next began offering the same service for cell phone numbers. At first the websites generally charged a fee for this service as gathering and maintaining the data for mobile numbers was not as simple.

The fee for a cell phone trace was small, but as data collection became easier the fees started to diminish and now most of the sites offer this reverse search service for free. Now with minimal searching on the Internet you can find the owner of a mobile number for free.

The next step will be to provide this service for international numbers, both land lines and mobile, for free. Right now there are several sites that will assist you to trace a cell phone number, but most of them charge for this service. Again as data becomes easier to collect and to share across international borders there is a very good chance that this service will become free as well.