Sometimes, we lose touch with the people we care about. It
happens many different ways. Perhaps you had their phone number written down
somewhere and misplaced it. Maybe they moved suddenly, and you never got back
in touch.
Nowadays, it's much easier to regain contact with people that have moved out of
our lives. The internet is an ever growing database, and our lives are becoming
more and more transparent. With the rise of social networking, complete
anonymity has become a thing of the past. This is a double-edged sword, but one
of the good things to come out of this change is the ability to find each other
again.
The first place to look is the popular search engines. If nothing turns up the
first time, try enclosing your friend's name in quotation marks like this:
"John Smith". This sometimes tells the search engine to search for
both words together and only together, so you don't get results like
"Sadie Smith [...] John Monroe". Yes, the text contains
"John" and "Smith" but not "John Smith".
Next stop should be the online phone listings. Even the Whitepages are online
now, so be sure to look there, especially if you have an idea of the city the
person is living in.
The final and perhaps most fruitful try should be to the popular social
networks. With pictures to go with all those names, you should be able to find
the "John Smith" you went to school with. Most everyone has a social
network profile these days, so use that to your advantage.
