The legal text that most people don’t even bother reading:
Some businesses/companies may put some contact information in their terms, terms and conditions, terms of use, acceptable user agreement, and/or the privacy policy. Some businesses/companies may choose to put it at the bottom while others may have it buried where it won’t stand out as easy.
They do not put this information here because they know people aren’t going to read it. They put it here because most likely it will have to do with legal matters for example, someone submitting a copyright notice to have something taken down alleging that their copyright is being violated, maybe sending a cease and desist letter, or or inquiring about how the company or business uses personal information that they collect, etc.
Social media sites like Facebook:
Some companies and businesses that have a social media presence specifically Facebook may have their contact information available under the “impression” (which is required if they are in the E.U. or specifically target European Union (E.U.) residence.) on the impressions page or tab. This will usually list their mailing address, email address, phone number.
BBB (Better Business Bureau):
In spite of this organization using bureau, they are not a government agency nor do they set any laws or regulations, they are simply an organization that more acts as a mediator between customer/client and the business/company to resolve any issues.
Businesses can earn a rating from an A+ to an F-, which I personally don’t agree with their rating, especially when a business receives an overwhelming number of complaints yet the business somehow has an A+ rating. Anyway, any business that is listed in the BBB will have contact information publicly available.
Internet search engine: wait what?
Internet search engines like Google specialize in sending web, crawlers, a.k.a. spiders to search the web and try to index as much as they possibly can access that is not restricted due to robots, password-protected or requires some type of authentication. As they crawl the web by scooping up everything publicly accessible to them, they also scoop up contact information and no, they don’t redacted or omit it from the search results which this allows you to be able to use the search engine to be able to search any pages that would contain, a partial match of contact information.
So how do you use a search engine to find contact information of a business or company?
If a business or company is pretty well-known like Microsoft, Home Depot, where they pretty much put their contact information out there, it’s quite easy to be able to get this information. However, there are other businesses and companies that don’t necessarily make it easy, but they don’t hide it either, meaning that it is buried and unfortunately, you have to dig it up.
To use a search engine to find contact information of a business or company enter quote start dot at symbol website.tld quote, so it will look like this “*@website.tld” (of course replace website.tld with the actual website and extension) then press enter. This will look for anything words that contains *@website.tld in the results.
Here are a few other ways you can try:
Usually, when it contains the search term, you have a much higher chance of finding contact information as opposed to just contact information on company, XYZ or contact company XYZ.