How to quickly find any person on VKontakte: 7 methods with detailed instructions

Imagine Steve Jobs - black turtleneck, piercing eyes - trying to present the iPhone, standing in the middle of a Papuan village where there is not even electricity.

Despite all his genius, Jobs is unlikely to succeed with such an audience. Advertising placed on a site with an inappropriate audience is also ridiculous and ineffective. By advertising in public pages that are not suitable for your audience, you lose money and time. It is much better to advertise where your potential customers live.

Standard search in VK

If you are registered on VKontakte and want to find another user of the social network, then you should not have any difficulties with the search. Especially if you know the full name of the person you are looking for and the city of his residence.

Enter the first and last name of the user you want to find in the search bar and click “Show all results” or press Enter. You will be taken to a page with general search results. At the top there will be 4 accounts that, in VKontakte’s opinion, best suit your request.

If the person you need is not there, click on “Show all” or go to the “People” section in the right menu. In this section you will be able to see all users who match your request.

You can try looking for a person who takes an active part in various events in the “News” section. There is a chance that he will be noted in the event records as a participant.

Considering the fact that the number of accounts on VKontakte has already exceeded 523 million, during the search process you will most likely encounter many namesakes of the person you want to find. Especially if he has a common first and last name. For example, if you enter “Ivan Sidorov” into the search, the result will be almost 14,000 people. To find what you need among them, you need to apply filters.

VK has quite a lot of filtering tools, so reducing the number of inappropriate profiles in search results is not difficult. Let's take a quick look at each setting you can configure.

Sorting. By default, it is set to “By popularity”, and all profiles are displayed in descending order of popularity: at the top are accounts with the largest number of friends and subscribers, at the bottom are those with the fewest. When you switch to the “By registration date” mode, the most recently registered users in VK will be shown at the top.

Region. Using this parameter, you can find a user by country and city.

School/University. Filters will only become available after you specify the user's city of residence. With their help, you can easily find both classmates and classmates with whom you have lost contact, as well as unfamiliar students and students of the educational institution. During the filling process, more detailed filters will become available, such as “Year of graduation”, “Faculty”, “Department” and others.

Age. This filter will greatly facilitate the search process for you. If you don't know the exact age, you can give an approximate range. Even if it is long, for example 10 - 15 years, it will still weed out many unsuitable profiles.

Floor. I think everything is clear here. If there are suspicions that the user might jokingly indicate the wrong gender in personal information, then it is better to leave the filter in the “Any” position.

Family status. There are 8 options - just choose the one that suits you.

With a photo. Check the box next to this item to exclude all users who do not have an avatar.

Online now. This item will only show people who are online at the time of the search.

Life position. This filter contains sub-items:

• worldview,
• the most important thing in life
• the main thing is in people
• Attitude towards smoking,
• attitude to alcohol.

It is unlikely that these parameters will help you find old acquaintances, but with their help you can find new friends and acquaintances with similar interests.

Place of work and position. Be sure to fill out these fields if you want to find a colleague or employee of a particular company.

Military service. Indicate the country, military unit and year of service - this way you are likely to find colleagues or military personnel from the unit you are interested in.

Additionally. This filter hides three parameters: year, month and birthday. If you have this information, be sure to fill out the fields provided.

Please note that if you specify any filter that is not filled in the user profile, it will not appear in the search results.

What does the position in the VK search by community depend on?

Members and activity in the group

Ranking in search results depends on activity in the group. Attendance, fresh posts and user comments on them, frequency of publications, discussions, likes, reposts - all these behavioral factors are taken into account. A lively, active group with high participation of participants should be more interesting to people than a less active one. Even if the less active group has more members. Therefore, groups in which there is more activity and of higher quality may appear higher in search results.

The number of participants and subscribers also matters, but is not decisive. Considering that this is an individual search, at the top there may be a group with a small number of participants, which a person recently found for the same query and entered it. Perhaps VK thinks he is looking for her again, so he shows her at the beginning.

Also in the top there may be a group containing the user’s friends or people who are in the same groups as himself.

It is not the total number of participants that is important, but the number of active, live users. Let’s assume that a group gained subscribers, and after a while they were either blocked, or stopped using the pages, or it was discovered that these were bots who also participated in other cheating. Suspicious accounts are identified quite easily. These subscribers no longer have any influence on the search position. From time to time, such subscribers may be “written off” (removed from the group).

The man who is looking

The main purpose of the search is to satisfy the user’s needs, solve his problem, and offer him the most suitable result. Therefore, the most “useful” groups, in which people are more likely to find what they need, may rise higher in search results. For example, a person looked through a lot of information in a group, subscribed to the group, and did not return to the search with the same request (since he found what he was looking for). These are positive signals.

In this case, to generate search results, the profile of a specific user, his interests or the interests of users similar to him can be taken into account.

For commercial communities and any others tied to a location (a specific city or district), the number of participants from this particular city or district is important. A person’s location also plays a role: for example, if he types “delivery” in the search, local communities will be suggested to him first.

Of course, such communities must have the country and city selected in the settings, even if the city is already in the name. People use a city filter when searching for groups, and if it is not specified, then such a group simply will not be found.

Title, description, content

The name and description of the group must match the search query, be relevant (contain the words or exact query that the person is looking for, and correspond to the meaning that he is looking for). This can be hampered by decorative symbols, too long a name, an overabundance of keywords and phrases (overspam), and the desire to write words in capital letters.

For the search, the community address (URL) that you set in the settings instead of clubXXXXXXXX may be important. Keywords in it should be separated by a dot or an underscore, for example: vk.com/dostavka_salatov.

The algorithm can take into account the content of the status line, the availability of goods in the community and their descriptions, and any other content.

Other

Verified communities (with a checkmark) rise higher in search results, even if their name does not contain the exact occurrence of the user's request or they have few participants. Read more about how to get a tick here:

• How to get a VKontakte tick (pass verification)

The importance of the search factors themselves varies depending on the query—that is, what exactly is being searched for. For some queries, relevance (compliance with the meaning of the query) is more important; for others, activity in the group or attendance is more important.

Results and conclusions

In the internal search of VK, many factors are taken into account and there is no simple answer to the question “Why is this group higher than another” or “Why does the search give me such results, but different results for my neighbor.”

The exact search algorithm will never be revealed in order to protect VK from attempts to raise the group to the top using various tricks and cheats. Of course, such attempts are made from time to time, but usually they lead to the blocking of the group, its exclusion from the search, or the loss of the accumulated subscribers.

Without first and last name

If you don’t know the first and last name of the person you want to find, or are not looking for someone specific, but want to make new acquaintances, then you should look at recommendations from VK and find possible acquaintances through your friends.

VKontakte recommendations

VK monitors the behavior of all users of the social network and, based on their activity, offers to add people you may know as friends.

The “Possible Friends” block with five potential candidates for friendship can always be seen on the page with the list of friends. The more mutual acquaintances you and a user have, the more likely it is that he will end up in this block.

To see all the users with whom, according to VK, you may be familiar, click on the “Show all” inscription. You can also get to this section through the “Find Friends” and “Search for Friends” buttons.

For users registered in other social networks, there is an opportunity to find their friends who are on VK and other social networks. The block with supported social networks is located in the lower right corner of the page. There you can also send an invitation to register on VKontakte to ten people from your telephone contacts.

Search through mutual friends

If you haven’t found the right person in the recommendations from VK, you can try to find him in your friend’s list of friends. VKontakte will sort all the people your friend has as friends, especially for you - at the top there will be users with whom, in the opinion of the social network, you may be familiar.

Any VKontakte member can hide up to 30 of his friends. So there is a chance that the person you need will be invisible to you.

How to find suitable VK groups for paid posts?

The standard functionality of VKontakte allows you to find groups that are suitable by topic (very general) or by name. This is not enough. First of all, because the topic is stated arbitrarily, just as the name does not always reflect the essence of the audience. It's simply too short for that.

I won’t dwell on the difficulties of choosing sites: they are known to anyone who has tried to advertise in public sites. Let's move on to solving the problem right away.

Another approach: we start with the user!

To find the sites we need, we just need to remember why this is being done. Our goal is to find groups where there are people receptive to our advertising. Let's then find these suitable people and see what groups they are in .

Of course, we won’t search manually. I bring to your attention the second tool of the SMMup.ru project - Search for groups based on target audience parameters. The tool is located at: https://smmup.ru/target.php

How it works?

The general idea is very simple:

1. You indicate the main parameters of your target audience
2. Based on them, a sample of users is prepared
3. The program collects data about which groups each user belongs to
4. The information is summarized, and as a result we see which groups are preferred by people who are our potential subscribers or clients.

Ha ha, you say. Well, as a result, MDK and EP will be the result - what every second person has subscribed to. That's no use!

That's right. Therefore, the fifth point is the most important! - consists in calculating the compliance index .

To understand what this is, you need to remember the basics of marketing theory. The concept of affinity index is well described in Wikipedia. Let me remind you here that this is an indicator of how much better advertising is perceived by the audience of a particular site in relation to the audience as a whole (random people). It might be easier to understand with examples:

You place an advertising post in 2 communities with the same number of subscribers. From one group you get 100 referrals, from the other - 200. So, the affinity index of the second site is twice as large. It's not hard to understand.

What if site X with 5,000 subscribers gave 200 clicks, and site Y with 10,000 gave 100 clicks? Then the affinity index of site Y is four times lower.

So here it is. The probability that a person in our sample is a member of a particular group directly depends on 2 factors: the size of the group and the affinity index of the site for this sample. But we know the number of subscribers of the group! So what's stopping you from calculating the fit index?

I’m turning this brief excursion into theory and moving on to practice. You don't have to delve into all the calculations with the matching index. Now you will see that it works and that's the main thing.

Without registration in VK

A special search page on a social network for people not registered in VK has never been created, but there are still a few tricks that will allow you to search for people without registering on a social network.

You can follow the link vk.com/search and immediately start searching. The same filters and rules that I wrote about above work on this page.

You can also get to the people search page during the process of restoring access to your profile. Click on the inscription “Forgot your password?” under the login and password entry form on the VK login page.

In the next window, follow the link for people who do not have access to a phone (it will be at the bottom of the page). And only then click on the “Click here” link to go to the search page.

Searching in search engines

Yandex has a special service for searching people. With its help, you can search for a person on 11 social networks at once, including VKontakte. You also have the right to limit the search only to vk.com or any other social network.

Enter the first and last name of the person you are looking for, select which sites to search for him on. Next, fill in the filters “Age”, “Accommodation”, “Study” and “Work”. As a result, you will receive all profiles that match the request.

Using the request “site:vk.com F.I.O.” you can search for people from VK in Google, Yandex and other search engines. The first part of the request (site) tells the search robot that it needs to search only on one specific site. The second part (vk.com) indicates this site. And instead of “F. AND ABOUT." you will need to provide the first and last name of the person you want to find.

Please note that you will not be able to find users who have hidden their accounts from search sites in their privacy settings through search engines.

Instructions: how to hide your subscriptions

For those who are interested in how to hide a group on VK from everyone, the social network has provided such an opportunity. This can be done either from a computer browser or from a phone.

From PC

To hide communities in VK, you need to:

• Open settings, the button is located in the upper right corner;

• Find “Privacy” - “Who sees the list...”;

• Select "Only Me".

Now only the owner of the page has access to information about community subscriptions. You can verify this yourself by going below in the privacy settings. There is a button that begins with the words “to make sure...”, by clicking on it you look at your page from the outside.

If you can hide subscriptions to groups in VK, it’s more difficult with interesting pages. It is impossible to hide them, there is only the option to unsubscribe and monitor them secretly. For convenience, so as not to search every time, you can bookmark it.

This is done like this: go to the page of the community that interests us. We mark the asterisk on the right side, the inscription “Save to bookmarks”.

If bookmarks are not reflected in the menu, then activate them. For this:

• "Settings";

• In the main ones we look for “Customize display”;

• ABOUT.

Now access to information marked in this way will be easy.

From phone

In order to hide the list of groups in VK from a mobile phone, you should follow the same path. Here the actions are identical to those we performed when logging in from a PC:

• Double-click on the profile icon.

• Go to the privacy category.

• There, find the item that is responsible for the secrecy of your groups.

• Select the desired option.

Search groups

You can try to find an old friend whose city of residence you know, or a person with whom you accidentally crossed paths on the street, using special groups in VK.

In almost every city there is a group called “Looking for You”. Post an ad with a description of the person and his photo (if available) in such a community. Perhaps they are also looking for you and will respond to your post, or maybe there will be people who recognize their friend in your description and help you.

Enter the query “Looking for you” in the community search bar and indicate the city in which you are looking for the person. Write an ad and send it through the “Suggest news” field. After some time, your entry will be published. After that, all that remains is to wait and check the comments under the post in the group.

How to see friends’ VK groups if they are hidden

The privacy settings of the VKontakte social network allow you to hide the list of profile communities from everyone. There is only one legal way to see friends’ VK groups if they are hidden.

Through a friend's news

This method is very simple, and most importantly absolutely legal. It does not require installing dubious applications.

• Log in to your user profile.
• Find the "Friends" block.
• To the right of the number of friends there is a “News” button.

• Click and go to the user's feed.
• The feed shows which groups the user receives notifications from. These are hidden communities.

This method will not work if the user has hidden the news. In this case, you will not be able to recognize the groups. All that remains is to ask the person personally, via messages.

Other ways to find out the list of hidden communities

The Internet offers a large number of applications that allow you to view hidden profile data. But this method is illegal and may pose a danger to your profile and computer.

You can often fall under the threat of phishing: with the help of a special program, scammers will gain access to your profile and personal data.

The best way to find out hidden friend groups is to ask them to give you access. If they don't want to do this, use only the legal method: watching the tape. Do not download third-party applications; with their help, scammers can find out your page login and password and gain access to personal data.

vkbaron.ru

Search by photo

If you have a photo of a person, then you are very lucky - you can find him using the photo. Go to the image search page in Google or Yandex and click on the camera icon. And after that, upload a photo. If the user posted this photo on a social network, the search engine will find it.

You can also search by photo on the social network itself. This is done on the news page in the “Photos” section. Insert into the search bar a link to a picture that has already been uploaded to VK, and in front of it specify the “copy:” parameter.

The link to the photo is taken from the browser's address bar, and only the part that relates to the photo is required. It starts with the word “photo” and ends before the “%” sign.

Basic ways to identify guests

In accordance with the policy of VKontakte developers, if the user has not expressed a desire for others to know that he has visited your profile, you will not know.

However, there are working ways to get around the restrictions and see your guests. With their help, visits from friends, as well as users not included in the contact list, will be revealed.

Some methods are based on social network functions. This is statistics, a rating of friends. Others are applications from third-party developers that work as traps and visit recorders.

Each method will be discussed later in the article.

A cool method is to delete your page (profile)

The first way to get acquainted with users viewing a profile is to supposedly delete your page.

Don’t be afraid - VK won’t reach the point of complete self-destruction, we’ll stop at the right moment.

Necessary:

• Log into your account on your computer or laptop. The method does not work via telephone;
• open settings;
• go to “General”;
• scroll the page;
• click “delete your page”;
• in response to the question why you are deleting your account, indicate that no one leaves comments. In response, the social network will write a message indicating the names of the two most frequent guests;
• cancel deletion;
• To get acquainted with the next two visitors, repeat the procedure.

The method works in the full version of the social network. Disadvantage: information about only two users is available at a time.

We use applications of the system itself - My guests, Your guests, My fans and guests, Guests and friends and others

A more effective way to track who visited my page is to launch special applications.

The programs provide the opportunity to:

• see who logged into your profile;
• analyze information about friends;
• set traps;
• make a rating of the guests' parts.

The most popular utilities are called:

• my guests;
• my fans and guests;
• my guests and analysis.

The “My Guests” application can be downloaded from the “Games” section in. The start window will appear after starting the program and watching commercials. Install for free. Works on Android, iPhone.

Then:

• go to the “Guests” tab;
• view a list of people who have recently visited the page. First, those who use the application for a fee and promote their profile will appear. You will see a heart on your avatar and a link to “add as friend.” In addition to them, guests who are interested in your profile will be listed. Additionally, there is information about the time and date of the last visit.

The application has functions:

• “buying” the interest of strangers to use social networks for promotion;
• viewing the rating of active guests,
• view which friends, when they visited you, were removed from the list of friends, blocked;
• for an additional fee - stealth mode.

The next spy utility, “My Fans and Guests,” works on the principle of a trap:

• copy the link to your profile;
• insert it into information, contacts, and pin it on the wall. The application records all visitors.

Launches from here. The application has an invisible function.

The “My Guests and Analysis” program makes it clear who viewed your page.

Additional functions:

• on the “Friends” tab, information appears when people from the list of friends viewed the profile or were online;
• in “fans” the most active users for a certain time are highlighted and ordered;
• the “sympathy analysis” lists the people who most like your friends;
• group analysis.

VIP status in the application gives you the right to become invisible and exclude advertising. You can launch it here.

Other utilities that register visitors:

• VK guests. Downloads from playmarket, works on android. Registers guests, fans, personal profile, creates traps;
• real guests of VK. Available on play market. The application shows people who visited the page. Visit time is approximate;
• guests and statistics from VKontakte. Tracks your friends' connections to your profile and creates traps. The guest viewing function works subject to the purchase of the application or daily access to statistics. Download address;
• friends and guests - for VK. Installs on iPhone with iTunes. Shows real visitors;
• I am a spy - my guests, friends like my page. Shows profile visitors, fans, and time of registration on the social network. An option to increase popularity is available. Launched from a social network.

Statistics analysis: likes, reposts, comments

In contact you can use the statistics function. This is a method for lovers of analytical activities with more than 100 subscribers.

By clicking on the graph icon, the user will receive information regarding:

• total number of guests;
• gender and age characteristics;
• cities, countries of visitors;
• the device from which you came to view the profile.

Data is sorted by time periods in the form of charts and graphs. There is information for today, week, month.

The information is useful for business accounts. Allows you to fine-tune your advertising.

Disadvantage: the data is not specified. It is impossible to find out the first and last name of the person who was on the page. Does not provide information about IP address, pop server. The method does not work if there are a small number of subscribers.

The easiest way to get reliable information about visitors is to view and analyze likes, comments, and reposts. The information is publicly available. It is accurate, but insufficient. Many users view pages but leave no trace of their presence. It is impossible to find them through likes and comments.

Friends rating

The next method involves viewing your contact's friends list. If he visited your page more often than others and interacted with you, you will be in the first positions in the list of friends.

To use your friends rating, you need to:

• open a contact’s profile in VK;
• go to his friends list;
• find yourself.

Flaws:

• the method is labor-intensive - you need to view the profiles of a large number of users;
• information can only be obtained about your friends on the social network;
• you have to determine which user you are interested in, only then receive confirmation of frequent interaction.

The advantage of the method is that it works on any type of device.

Using a link-trap or voting

An original way to see carefully hidden visitors is to install a trap on the site.

For this:

• find, launch the Pathfinder application. The function is available in other programs;
• get the link;
• post on a page, for example, in a profile;
• if someone clicks on the link, the user will receive an alert.

The downside is that not everyone clicks on the links. The advantage is that information about all users who visited the page becomes available.

Similar programs:

• my fans and guests;
• VK guests.

You can understand that users are interested in the profile by creating a poll in VK.

Algorithm:

• create a new entry;
• in “more” select poll”;
• indicate the name, voting period;
• choose who can see the survey.

The topic should touch a nerve. In this case, people will express opinions.

Method using Odnoklassniki

The next method is also based on a trap.

The essence of the method is to publish a link to a Odnoklassniki profile on a VKontakte page. OK has a visitor registration function, which VK lacks. By transferring invisible guests from one social network to another, you can find out about them.

Mechanism of action:

• open the page in OK;
• copy the profile link from the browser bar;
• paste on the wall;
• so that others are filled with curiosity, the desire to go to a page on another network, add a beautiful photo, description;
• pin the entry.

Disadvantages of this method:

• the user and his guests must have an account in Odnoklassniki;
• Perhaps the person came in without a link.