To search for Instagram profiles within the app or website, you need an account. While creating an account is straightforward, this may not always be an option if you don't want one.

Regardless of why you want to do an Instagram search without an account, we'll explain how to do it in this article. Continue reading to learn how to search for Instagram profiles without logging in.

How to Search on Instagram Without an Account

There are two effective ways to search Instagram profiles without an account. You'll find more about them below.

Use Search Engines

Search engines like Google and Bing index hundreds of billions of web pages. Many of these web pages are social media accounts, including Instagram profiles.

If you want to search for Instagram profiles without an account, search engines can help. However, due to the broad results search engines bring, you may have difficulties finding the profiles you need.

Luckily, you can narrow the results by taking advantage of advanced search features. For example, when searching on Google, you can enter the username or the person's name using quotation marks. This will display results that exactly match your search.

Your search should look like this: [ Instagram "johndoe" ] or [ Instagram "John Doe" ].

To further narrow the results, you can specify to Google that you only want results from Instagram's website.

For this, include the site name in the beginning. Example: [ site:instagram.com "John Doe" ]

Search engines also index posts shared by Instagram users. If you can't find the profile you're looking for under all results, check the image results. However, this won't work with Instagram profiles set to private. We'll touch more on these accounts below.

Use a People Lookup Tool

Because search engines index so many web pages, there's a chance that even an advanced search may not yield the results you expect, which brings us to our second method for doing an Instagram search without account. You can use a people lookup tool like UnMask to find someone's Instagram account.

Simply enter the person's first and last name, along with city and state details to filter the results and wait for UnMask to compile a full report. The report will be ready in a few minutes, and you'll see the social media profiles associated with the person, including Instagram accounts.

Although this isn't exactly a search within Instagram, it is much more effective than digging through millions of profiles if you're trying to find the profile of a specific person.

What if the User's Instagram Account is Set to Private?

Even if you find the user's Instagram profile, you won't be able to view their posts if the account is set to private. In these cases, you will need to create an account and send them a request to follow.

There are websites that claim to reveal the posts of private Instagram profiles, but none of them actually work. Instagram has numerous security and privacy features that allow its users to share their posts only with their followers. Unless you create an account and the Instagram user accepts your follow request, you can't view their posts.

If you end up finding the Instagram account you want only to find out it is set to private, try finding the person on other social media sites, like Twitter and Facebook. The methods we've explained above will work for these social media platforms as well, though you will see them automatically after searching for them on the people lookup tool we recommended above.

Searching and Viewing Instagram Posts Without an Account

What we've discussed throughout the article can help you search Instagram profiles without an account. However, you won't be able to view their posts if the user has set their profile to private. The only way to view their posts in this case is to create an account and send them a follow request.

Although doing an Instagram search without an account using search engines can assist you in finding numerous profiles, using a people lookup tool will be much more effective. It will enable you to locate not only the person's Instagram profile but also a list of their social media accounts.