The Truth About Finding Old Friends For Free!

Dec 13
11:10

2010

David Sharp

David Sharp

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Searching for those old friends is not always as straightforward as it may seem. Be careful not to spend too much money on your search or better still let us show you how to go about finding your old friends for free.

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There are plenty of reasons why we want to find our old friends,The Truth About Finding Old Friends For Free! Articles that we may have lost touch with over the years. When we are young we have the friends we grew up with, went to school and college with, and maybe even started work with. We have the notion that we will always stay in touch with our friends and cannot imagine ever losing contact with them. Unfortunately life has other ideas, and as the years roll by it is so easy to lose contact with those old friends.

We then come to a point in our life when we have a need to get in touch again with these early friends, how on earth do we go about this and more importantly how do we go about finding old friends for free. Because lets face it some of the traditional search methods can work out very expensive. I'm particularly thinking about private investigators and the like.

It is not only the expense that we have to worry about but also the cost in our own personal time. Especially if we have to spend time searching through physical records and the many hours we might have to spend on phone calls, most of which will be fruitless. Add in the factor that the person we are searching for may have changed their name, and everything suddenly becomes a lot more difficult.

These days we have the internet to help us search for our old friends and with the proliferation of many specialized people search engines, finding those long-lost friends, or relatives suddenly becomes a lot easier. We do however need somewhere to start, so it is well worth while spending a few minuets thinking about the person you are trying to locate. Obviously you will know their name and this is the obvious place to start, but just searching by name could possibly throw up thousands of results. So if possible try to narrow it down to where you think they may be living today.

If you have no idea where they may be living then you will have some idea of their age and this can be factored into your search along with their middle name, if they have one.

So back to the internet and where to start searching?

The obvious starting point for most of us would be Google, and indeed if your old friend has a high-profile of some sort then you may indeed strike lucky and find them almost immediately. Unfortunately your friend will need a high web presence to show up in any Google search, so this will not help most of us. If you don't believe me, then just try typing your own name into Google and see what happens!

So where does that leave us?

Well this is where the specialized people search engines come into their own. These have huge databases of everyone living in the United States, that are regularly updated, and if your old friend is living anywhere in the U.S.A. then these search engines will locate them. What you have to be careful of though is the cost that some of the different people search engines will charge you for locating your old friends.

Whilst just about all of them claim to be able to find your old friends for free, most of them will only give you very limited free search results, like name and town. Then they will charge you a fee to 'unlock' the search results and give you a more detailed address and maybe even their phone number. Many people do pay to get these results because they do not realize that with a little searching they can actually go about finding their old friends for free. Beware also of some people search engines that do give you free results but have very outdated databases, because they cannot pay the high monthly cost of keeping these up to date, these can give you results that are years out of date.

So there you have it, if you know the name of your old friend, and better still what state they are living in, then finding them will be a breeze.