Do you ever wonder what happened to your old grade school, high school or college friends? Maybe you’d like to get in touch and see how they’re doing? It’s not as hard as you may think, thanks to the Internet. Here are some tips for using the Internet to find old friends:

First, the most obvious places to check are the big classmate and reunion sites. Check out Classmates.com and Reunion.com first. You’ll find a decent portion of the people from your high school class listed on these sites, especially Classmates.com, since they’ve been around the longest and advertise the most. Unfortunately, if you find someone on one of these sites, you’ll have to pay for membership to contact

them. The sites have to pay the bills somehow and that’s the catch. However, if you don’t want to pay, there are other options. Quite often, if the person you are looking for is a female and has gotten married, you will be able to see what their new last name is, which will make finding them a whole lot easier for you. You’ll also be able to see the city where the person lives *now*, again, another valuable detail.

Searching

Now, let’s search the Internet for the person. I recommend trying Google first, then MSN, as MSN technically has the largest database of indexed pages and the freshest index as well.

Search Tips

Search for the person’s name first,

with quotations:

“Alexandra Jones”

If the person has a unique name, your results will be smaller, but if they have a common name, you’ll need to narrow the search greatly. Try searching with a middle initial or full middle name. You can also add a state or the initials of a state, like this:

“Alexandra Alicia Jones”
“Alexandra A Jones”
“Alexandra Jones”, FL
“Alexandra Jones”, florida

Perhaps the person was an artist or a writer? Add the words, “art” or “author” to the search. You’ll be surprised at how greatly this narrows your search. Same if the person is a mechanic, engineer or interior designer. Add these words or variations of these words to the search to refine the results. Many

professions and businesses have websites where they may list the names of employees. If you know the person is a dentist, try searching the dental directories online, it’s likely they are listed so that new patients can find them.

Be sure to take advantage of the Advanced Search features of every search engine, these features are usually very easy to use and extremely powerful. You’ll see Google’s Advanced Search link right on their front page.

There are also specialty search engines available which come in handy for finding certain people online. There are specialty search engines for books, blogs, news, images, media, and practically any topic you can think of.

Don’t forget to search the local newspaper website for the

town from which you graduated, maybe they were mentioned in a story? Also, your high school website may even have an alumni section where you can register and search for alumnus. Don’t forget to search the big yellow and white pages directories online, they may just be listed! Also try the AOL, Yahoo, Myspace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Friendster and other community member directories. Some people may even be involved in researching their family trees online, so try checking the major genealogy sites for their last name, they may be posting!

Maybe you remember that this person loved cross stitch sewing, Billy Joel or deep sea fishing? You can check some message boards with these niche topics, you might find that an

“AlexandraJ” has 1000 posts on Billy Joel’s official message board. That might be her!

If All Else Fails

There are specific people search engines available. These usually search public records. For the most powerful ones, you’ll have to pay for real contact information. You can also have Yahoo or Google alert you anytime the person’s name pops up in a news story or on the web, by using Yahoo or Google Alerts. Go to google.com/alerts to set one up. If you came up empty, this is a great way to use a search engine to let you know about any new search results, blog postings or other news items with a specific name mentioned.

If after exhausting every online avenue,

you still can’t find any mention of this person, it’s possible this person moved, changed names, moved out of the country or just doesn’t want to be found.

You’ll also want to be prepared for any delicate information you find, often public records will show up in searches, so you may see records for a bankruptcy, foreclosures, divorce records, criminal records, legal trouble, disturbing blog postings or even an obituary.

Lydia Quinn writes for Productivus Directory, a free SEO friendly directory of high quality, handpicked websites. Productivus Directory features a completely unique category structure dedicated to helping users make their time online more productive. Visit us at: http://www.productivus.com