The discovery of quasars in the early 1960's
quickly spurred the idea that these amazingly powerful sources derive their
energy from accretion of matter onto a compact, extremely massive object,
most likely a supermassive black hole (SMBH;
Zel'dovich & Novikov
1964;
Salpeter 1964;
Lynden-Bell 1969)
with M 
106 - 109
M
. Since then this
model has provided a highly useful framework for the study of quasars, or
more generally, of the active galactic nucleus (AGN) phenomenon
(Rees 1984;
Blandford & Rees 1992).
Yet, despite its success, there is little empirical
basis for believing that this model is correct. As pointed out by
Kormendy & Richstone
(1995,
hereafter KR), our confidence that SMBHs must power AGNs
largely rests on the implausibility of alternative explanations. To be
sure, a number of characteristics of AGNs indicate that the central
engine must be tiny and that relativistic motions are present. These
include rapid X-ray variability, VLBI radio cores, and superluminal
motion. However,
solid evidence for the existence of SMBHs in the centers of galaxies has,
until quite recently, been lacking.
As demonstrated by
Soltan (1982),
simple considerations of the quasar
number counts and standard assumptions about the efficiency of energy
generation by accretion allows one to estimate the mean mass density of
SMBHs in the universe. The updated analysis of
Chokshi & Turner (1992)
finds 
2 ×
105
0.1-1
M Mpc-3
for a radiative efficiency of
=
0.10.1.
Comparison of
with the B-band galaxy luminosity density of
1.4×108h
L Mpc-3
(Lin et al. 1996),
where the Hubble constant
H0 = 100h km s-1 Mpc-1,
implies an average SMBH mass per unit
stellar luminosity of ~ 1.4×10-3
0.1-1h-1
M /
L. A typical bright
galaxy with LB*
1010h-2
L potentially
harbors a SMBH with a mass
1070.1-1 h-3
M. These very general
arguments lead one to conclude that "dead" quasars ought to be lurking
in the centers of many nearby luminous galaxies.
The hunt for SMBHs has been frustrated by two principal limitations. The
more obvious of these can be easily appreciated by nothing that the "sphere
of influence" of the hole extends to
rh 
GM /
2
(Peebles 1972;
Bahcall & Wolf 1976),
where G is the gravitational constant and
is the velocity dispersion
of the stars in the bulge, or, for a distance of D, ~ 1"
(M / 2
× 108
M)( / 200 km
s-1)-2(D/5 Mpc).
Typical ground-based observations are therefore severely hampered by
atmospheric seeing, and only the heftiest dark masses in the closest
galaxies can be detected. The situation in the last few years has improved
dramatically
with the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and radio VLBI
techniques. The more subtle complication involves the actual modeling
of the stellar kinematics data, and in this area much progress has also
been made recently as well.
Here I will highlight some of the observational efforts during the past two decades in searching for SMBHs, concentrating on the recent advances. Since this contribution is the only one that discusses nuclear BHs aside from that in the Milky Way (Ozernoy, these proceedings) and in NGC 4258 (Miyoshi, these proceedings), I will attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, although no claim to completeness is made, as this is a vast subject and progress is being made at a dizzying pace. To fill in the gaps, I refer the reader to several other recent review papers, each of which has a slightly different emphasis (KR; Rees 1998; Richstone 1998; Ford et al. 1998; van der Marel 1999).