Seek and You Just May Find Them

Over the years, you’ve probably had a lot of friends with whom you thought you’d be buddies forever.

Now, if you could only figure out where they are.

We’ve all lost track of people who were once a part of our lives. Maybe it was a childhood friend, a college roommate, a neighbor, an early romance, a later romance.

Now, with the Internet and some luck, you might be able to locate your missing person in seconds. It’s an example of the way the world has become much smaller in this digital age. And, it’s a sobering reminder of the erosion of privacy in the information age.

There are now several databases on the World Wide Web that include almost every telephone listing in the country. These tools are easy to use, lightning fast and free to anyone with an Internet connection.

One of the most popular and far-reaching is Switchboard at https://www.switchboard.com. This is an advertiser-supported service (which means there will be little ads at the top of most Switchboard pages) that reportedly gives you access to more than 90 million telephone numbers. All you need to do a search is the last name of a person. But of course you narrow it down a great deal if you add the first name or even initial, and any information you might have about where the person lives.

Then you click on the “search” button and in a few seconds (given that you have a reasonably fast modem), Switchboard lists the matching names.

I gathered 21 names of lost friends from colleagues and went searching for them using Switchboard and a similar service, Four11, at https://www.four11.com. Out of these names, I found four right away.

You can also try other types of searches, if the person you’re looking for has an e-mail address or is mentioned on one of the millions of World Wide Web pages.

For an e-mail address search to be successful, the address would have to include the person’s name, and many do. You can do that type of search on Four11.

Web pages might mention your friend if the person has been published, holds office in a major company, works in the digital field, teaches at a university or even coaches a local field hockey team if that team happens to have its own home page.

Several Web search engines are available and they all give slightly different results. I’m currently partial to AltaVista at https://www.altavista.com, but Magellan at https://www.mckinley.com seems to do a particularly good job at searching university pages.

This kind of searching is fascinating, but remember, not only do these digital searches make it easier to find someone, they also make it easier for others to find you.

A number of years ago a friend of mine was stalked by a disturbed man. After several moves to different cities, she thought she had finally rid herself of him.

But then her employer gave her an e-mail address that included her last name. A few weeks later, she got e-mail from the stalker.

Search engines, like most wonders of the digital age, are a dual-edged sword.

* Cyburbia’s e-mail address is david.colker@latimes.com.