wanting to be found

It’s difficult to find old high-school friends on the Web. Many of them don’t have any reason to publish pages with bylines or about themselves. It’s even harder when their names have changed since they left school (i.e. most of my friends from that time). That makes it tough to do a casual “where are they now?” search on Google. Social networks like Facebook don’t help much if you’ve been out of school more than a decade, and alumni-finder sites tend to be horrible little pay-for-everything silos.

I realize that many people probably don’t want to be found under their old names, but I do, because there were some really cool people I knew back then and I know they’ve probably come into their own since. Even if they don’t have reason to publish on the Web, they might find themselves doing a casual search for my old name, so I’d like to help that link to my current online identity. The best way I’ve come up with is to make a simple Chris Craig at UCHS page that does nothing but link to my profile here. I’m hoping that’ll be enough to make the connection in the Googlebrain, but we’ll see.

Any other ideas? Have you run into this problem yourself?

2 thoughts on “wanting to be found

  1. Jaime

    The one and only reason I joined MySpace is because of their search capabilities. You can narrow your search to a specific graduation year at a given high school. Though many people don’t provide a lot of information on their profiles (including their full names), they don’t seem to mind giving out graduation information. That makes it easy to at least retrieve a selection of people for further review. I got 74 MySpace results out of 253 students in my senior class.

    Here’s my post on the subject:
    http://www.abigguy.com/abb/?p=225

  2. Karen

    I’ve avoided it for a while. What if I find someone I knew? What if they find me? I’ve managed to avoid contact with anyone from high school for, oh, 11 years now… Hmm. I think it helps to change your name right out of high school. During college. Yes, that definitely helps.

    Oh, wait, you’re trying to find people. Um, no help here. :)

Comments are closed.
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