Finding Old Friends:
Do It On The Internet ... Maybe

by Mr. Knowalot

Mr. Knowalot is a strong believer in a college education. If you get a chance, go to college. Go to several. You will learn things. You will get a degree, if you don't do something stupid, such as not pay your library fines. You may also make some friends, if you buy a keg now and then. Eventually you will leave college and get a life, then you'll want to find your old friends.

They may owe you beer money.

So now that you've lost touch with them for all these years, how do you find these old friends? On the Internet, of course! In a moment Mr. Knowalot will expand on the many ways to do this, but first, here's how I used to do it.

Many years ago Mr. Knowalot attended one or more colleges. Among my favorites was UCLA, where I received a master's degree in Film Production. This took three years, in addition to two years getting a bachelor's degree from San Jose State, which followed the associate's degree I earned from Chaffey College (Alta Loma, CA) after doing some preliminary work at Gavilan College (Gilroy, CA), De Anza College (San Jose) and Pasadena City College (Pasadena, CA).

As you can see, not only was I near all kinds of education, but I also drank some beer.

One of my best drinking buddies was a young woman with a rather long and complicated name. For the sake of brevity, I'll call her Margaret-Mary St. Francis de Kopoulos Smith. We lost touch shortly after graduation. She had been signing yearbooks and collapsed in exhaustion. Her parents took her away and I never saw her again. Later, when I decided to find her, I had a plan. I knew she'd be working in films, so at the end of a movie, while everyone else made their way up the aisle, I would stay and watch the credits.

This was before the Internet came along, of course. Now if I want to find a friend, I use one of the online search engines. Since I more or less gave up on my UCLA pal, I decided to search for my high school friend, John Paul Jones (his real name, honest). Here are the search engines I tried:

1. Planet Direct's People Search: The last place I saw John was in Enid, Oklahoma. So I typed in his name, left the city blank to widen the search, and typed OK in the state field. There's a choice of searching for an email address or the address and phone. I chose the latter. In a moment, there he was! All ten of him.
   
   Yes, not surprisingly, Planet Direct provided phone numbers and addresses for ten John Joneses. Since I hadn't asked for email addresses, I would need to dial some long-distance phone calls to see if I'd discovered any matches. But there were only ten, so ...
   
   Wait a minute! Planet Direct had returned ten matches, but at the bottom of the list was a link reading "Click HERE for the next 10 matches." Unfortunately, it didn't tell me how many total matches had been found. I clicked HERE about five times and kept getting ten more matches, until I quit, overwhelmed. I should have made an old friend with a less common name.
   
   Then I tried ...
   
   
2. Yahoo's People Search: With this you can also search for an email address or a phone number. This time I chose email. Yahoo returned only 13 matches. Encouraging. A quick email to these guys couldn't take long. Ah, but there's a link to "Phone Search." Clicking here returned 200 matches, with phone numbers and addresses, as well as names of spouses.
   
   John had a wife when I saw him in 1980, but I can't remember her name. Anyway, I heard he'd gotten divorced. So he could be any one of these guys. Hm, there's a James and John Jones in Tulsa. Guess that could be him. It might explain the divorce.
   
   Then I tried ...
   
   
3. Excite's People Finder and Email Lookup: These are separate links and entirely different functions. The People Finder finds addresses and phone numbers. It allows you to search for all or just the first part of a name. My search for John Jones in OK returned a list of ten names, with a link to "Next 10 Matches" at the bottom. As with Planet Direct, I didn't know how many total matches there were. There were no spouse names, either.
   
   The Email Lookup gives you no way to search by state. If you know the person's domain name (such as aol.com), you can limit the search that way. Since I had no idea what John's domain might be, or if he had email, or if he was still in Oklahoma (or even on the planet), this was not useful.

What would be useful is for these search engines to have more information. For instance, I know John's birthday, his parents' names, the high school he graduated from, his favorite Beatle song, when he lost his virginity, and even a few intimate things. However, availability to this kind of information may not happen for a long time. People are still concerned about privacy (rightfully so, to some extent). If there were a clearinghouse where people could provide information on a voluntary basis, old friends could connect much more easily.

Of course there's one depressing part of all this. When I search on Mr. Knowalot's alter ego (Brad Ryder), there are less than five in the entire country. If any of my old friends were trying to find me, they'd have very little trouble. I'm still waiting, John.

So I think I'll go back to watching movie credits.

By the way, I had a near miss in my search for Margaret-Mary, my buddy from UCLA. Not too long ago -- in the credits of a movie whose name I cannot recall -- I got my hopes up. There on the screen, big as life, taking up two lines, was the name:

Margaret-Mary St. Francis de Kopoulos Smith-Brown

That's the closest I've come. But I'll keep looking. I know she's out there somewhere.

Mr. Knowalot has spent quite a lot of time in college classrooms (alternately as a teacher and student) taking notes for Brad Ryder, a guy he knows in Keene, New Hampshire.

Other articles by Mr. Knowalot can be found at http://www.knowalot.com.

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