I absolutely loved my best friend from elementary school. We did everything together and we were able to talk about our fears and concerns. We lost contact in high school because his family moved out of the area. The older I got, the more I felt like I wanted to connect with her and tell her what an influence she had been on me. But how do you locate someone when you don’t even know what state they live in anymore and you haven’t had contact for many years? Locating old friends over the Internet can be difficult and time consuming, but it’s not impossible.
It had a common last name and when I googled it in quotes it showed over 4000 results. The challenge is how to narrow the search and not eliminate the needle in the haystack. It was easy to remove a few hundred hits based on age. Removing them meant clicking through to advanced search and testing various keywords. So it’s worth spending a few minutes scanning, clicking, and removing a few more keywords. Ten more minutes of fiddling brought the huge list to 418. Now, he could contact all of them and see if he was the one. However, there was another problem. He may have gotten married and I have no idea what his new last name was.
Although there are many paid resources available, there are also others, such as Zabasearch, that do not cost anything. When using it for the first time and providing the clues from my Google search, I got 531 results. Surprisingly, many included phone numbers and some included ages, eliminating quite a few possibilities. This would have left me with around 200 options to keep track of. But it had one of the best features: the ability to leave a message on a discussion board to see if she or someone who knew her would contact me.
In fact, I left a message. I entered what little information I had about my status and immediately came up with two potential results. The site then linked to my email to see if my long lost friend had an email with my directory. There is no such luck. Other directories are also available. Yahoo can also be helpful. It’s a chore to go through the 200 emails and contact information. The fact is that there are also some paid services that charge a nominal fee to do some of the legwork because they already have databases. If you want to save time, you can use these services.