SEARCHING FOR PEOPLE ON THE WEB

By Dave Wallace

RIVER BENDER - May 1999

One of the fun things to do on the Internet is search for long lost friends. Perhaps you'd like to locate an old high school or college buddy or maybe you'd like to contact a lost relative that may have some of your genealogy data. With a bit of patience and knowledge of how to search on the Internet one can usually find at least some of the people they've lost. Web sites also exit that will search for a fee. To get started you'll need to use a "people" search engine. Here's a few of the URLs. I personally like InfoSpace.com:

Search Engines for Finding People

InfoSpace.Com http://infospace.com/

Bigfoot http://www.bigfoot.com/

Switchboard http://www.switchboard.com/

Lycos People Finder http://www.whowhere.lycos.com/

AT&T's AnyWho directories http://www.anywho.com/tf.html

Where On Earth is James Smith?

If you're looking for a name like James Smith, you're really off to a bad start. That's because James and Smith happen to be the most common names in the U.S., with Smith accounting for one percent of all surnames. If you're interested, take a look at http://www.iarelative.com/1990cen.htm which is a 1990 Census list of the most common names in the U.S. I've never been able to find my old friend Sam Jones.

Using InfoSpace.com and searching for myself, I received a list of 250+ addresses. Adding "NC" to the search reduced the list to 41 and adding "New Bern" finally selected only my address. You definitely need more information than just the name if the name you're searching is fairly common.

An interesting feature of InfoSpace.com is that once you've found the person's address, you can get a map display of the neighborhood and even a list of neighbors' names and addresses. E-mail addresses may also be looked up. If the person you're searching for doesn't have e-mail, you might try sending e-mail to a neighbor next door and politely ask if they'll deliver it.

Some search engines do reverse searches where you can provide the e-mail address or telephone number and it will search for the name of the person.

High School or College Friends

If you're looking for an old high school or college friend you might try "World Alumni Net" (http://www.alumni.net/). This web page is just getting started but as people register under their school name it could become a good database. Nobody was shown registered in my high school graduating class. Perhaps they all passed away. A similar Web Page called "Classmates" is at http://www.classmates.com/.

Deceased People

If you're looking for dead people you can always go to the US Social Security Death Index at http://www.ancestry.com/ssdi/advanced.htm. This has 60 million people and surprisingly provides their social security number. Seems like a good place for a scam artist to go to resurrect the dead.

Another interesting place is the "Dead People Server" if you'd like to know if a particular celebrity died or not. Go to http://dpsinfo.com/ to resolve an argument at the dinner table over whether old whatshisname died that played the leading role in whatsthename movie. By the way did you know that Maureen O'Hara is still alive but Maureen O'Sullivan died in 1998? Lots of people got these two mixed up. Ok, so you don't really care.