Other Search Sites and Dead-Serious Searches

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I hope you get the idea now. The searches at most of the places on the Web are similar to the ones at Lycos and Four11. At WhoWhere (http://www.whowhere.com) you can also register your own information and enter your own personal profile, essentially providing you with your own Web page if you like. At 555-1212 (http://www.555-1212.com) you can search the directories at Switchboard (http://www.switchboard.com), Four11, Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com), and InfoSpace (http://www.infospace.com). 555-1212 is not so graphics intensive as some of the other sites, which makes it a bit faster, too.

Now, If you still haven't located your friend at any of those places, you can hop over to John December's Internet�Searching People page (http://www.december.com/cmc/info/internet-searching-people.html) and find even more Web sites to search.

Should you try all those resources and still not get lucky, you might want to check out the Usenet FAQ: How to find people's E-mail addresses at http://www.math.uio.no/faq/finding-addresses.html. There you'll find some 16 pages of information, some of it pretty arcane, but all of it very helpful if you are really serious about your search. The information in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) assumes in many cases that you know how to do specialized searches with specific commands such as finger and whois but there are also more general pointers to Web sites for narrowing down your searches to specific colleges or commercial networks (like AOL, Compuserve, and others).

You'll notice in the FAQ that there is a Usenet news group called soc.net-people. This is your resource of last resort. I don't care what some friend told you about posting your question to this group in order to find your friend, don't do it until you read the "Tips on using soc.net-people." And even then think twice. If someone were trying to find you, would you want them asking about you on such a public forum, where heaven only knows how many people are reading? Exhaust every other means before you go this route, please.

As many Web sites as there are for searching telephone directories, e-mail lists, and Usenet postings, you serious searchers could be tangled in the Web for quite some time. I'd suggest having a standing order with your local pizza delivery to ensure that you get a least one meal a day. Even more casual searchers are likely to find that hours and hours have slipped away while you were looking for that old friend. If you're like me, you'll get sidetracked often. Have fun with it and happy hunting!

Linda Brigman is webmaster for Research Triangle Institute in NC, administering RTI's servers on the Internet and Intranet. She's the author of Web Site Management Excellence (Que, Aug. 1996) and an occasional contributor to WebMaster magazine (CIO Communications).