Patent ID: 7526277

Claim:
A method of locating a cellular telephone number for a user, the method comprising: accessing an online database of cellular telephone numbers, wherein the database is modified automatically upon receipt of an update from a service-provider in response to at least one of: a modification of an existing service-provider cellular telephone number database and a request from the online database; providing a search request, wherein the search request has one or more search terms, the search request comprising at least one search parameter, the at least one search parameter indicating that the search collect all records in the database satisfying one or more characters in the one or more search terms preceding a wildcard character and ignore records in the database satisfying one or more characters in the one or more search terms following the wildcard character; and receiving at least one cellular telephone number in response to the search, wherein the at least one cellular telephone number is not received when the database is instructed to redact the cellular telephone number, wherein instructing the database to redact the cellular telephone number comprises using information contained in a list of individuals that have requested to not list their cellular telephone number to determine the cellular telephone number is to be redacted, wherein the information contained in the list comprises a reason why the cellular telephone number has been requested to be redacted.