Finding Classmates From the Past
Learn to Use Different Web Tools to Locate Friends and Classmates
May 15, 2009
The internet offers a plethora of tools that can be used to locate friends and classmates from the past. Often, people will change their address and contact information without remembering to update alumni registries or sending out change of address notices, which can make it difficult to stay in contact. By properly utilizing internet tools, a person can find friends with an easy click of a button.
This article will outline three different types of internet people search methods and their benefits. It will also explain how to navigate the sites, and what is involved in their use.
Social Networking Sites:
Social networking sites have swept the world, and by searching through Facebook.com, Myspace.com, and LinkedIn.com, a person can search through almost half a billion different people. These sites are all free to use, though LinkedIn.com does offer premium memberships that cost money.
The only drawback to using social networking sites as a search tool is also their benefit. Hundreds of millions of searchable people available greatly increases your chances of finding the correct person. It also can take a great deal of time to manually sort through such a vast amount of people.
All of these sites have a “search” or “browse” function available to search through member databases. Also, they offer refined search options, which can help narrow the search by adding the sought after person’s location, interests, hobbies, or other personalized information.
Email:
Almost all Americans have at least one email account. This means that searching through email address databases can be a very effective way to track people down. Sites such as Emailfinder.com offer search tools that allow a person to search for people using two different approaches.
The first is a forward email address search, which means that by typing in a person’s name, the site will sift through over 400 million different email accounts in order to find the contact information being sought after.
The other option offered through email finder sites is a reverse email address search. This feature allows a person to search using an email address. Oftentimes people will change their email address without informing alumni directories of the change.
By typing in a person’s email address into the search box, a person can verify whether that the address is still active and find out owner’s information about the person, even if the account is no longer being used.
Email finder sites do not simply search through email addresses though; they also search through twenty of the largest social networking sites in order to find the sought-after person. This totals well over a billion different social network accounts, which will be sorted through in mere seconds.
The information that can be found on sites like EmailFinder.com include things like the sought-after person’s address, phone numbers, family members, occupation, interests, and more. These features do require a small fee, but great deals can be found by purchasing year-long memberships.
Telephone:
Phone numbers also offer a huge database in which to search for someone because just about everyone has a landline or cell phone number, oftentimes both. By using a site like Reversephonedetective.com it is possible to type in a phone number and see if the number from ten years ago still belongs to whom you think it does.
Other phone related searches can be found at Whitepages.com, which allows a person to type just about any information they have about another’s location into a search box in order to help narrow down the search.
This site can offer information like the person’s address, phone number, and members of their household. The drawback to this type of search is that it requires a fairly accurate knowledge of the sought after person’s location.
If, after searching through phone number and email address databases, and social networking sites, you are still unable to find the sought after person, it probably means that the person you’re seeking is one of three things: an undercover CIA agent who has had their identity erased for your protection; a computer hacker who purposely stays off the grid to prevent exposing their whereabouts to the government; or they have subsequently dropped off the internet. Regardless, it will probably make finding them rather difficult.
