In truth, it doesn’t matter if it’s long, lost relatives or friends – the frustrations in finding someone you have lost contact with can be immense.
Once upon a time you may have had to rely on a private investigator to help your plight. Fortunately, nowadays such costly solutions aren’t always necessary, with the internet helping in this regard a lot.
The purpose of today’s post is to take a look at three of the best ways of using the internet to find someone who you have lost contact with. As you will soon see, the process is becoming easier and it means there are countless examples of people being found within minutes of a simple internet search.
Using a people search service
Let’s start with one of those options that a lot of people don’t even consider. There are now free people searches – and the name should give everything away here.
In short, it’s a search engine for people. Some of you might suggest that you can just use social media networks for this, but these services offer a lot more features.
They allow you to enter much more details in your search, which means that you might not necessarily be provided with thousands of results for “John Smith”. In other words, you can filter immensely – and this is exactly what most people require in their big search.
A toned down approach – social media
We touched upon this in the previous section, but the emergence of social media really has helped people find lost relatives.
Unfortunately, all of the mainstream platforms don’t offer quite as many parameters as a people search service – but they can at least give you a start. You can search for people in a particular area, or who have held jobs at specific workplaces, and this can give you a real platform to build on.
Additionally, now most social accounts are tied up to email accounts, it means that as soon as you make contact the person you are looking to communicate with is likely to receive your message almost instantly.
Traditional search engines
Once upon a time this might have been your only way to tackle a missing person, yet the above two suggestions have shown how this is now changed. Nevertheless, traditional search engines like Google still have their place when it comes to tracking long, lost relatives – although the best ways to take advantage are to tap into some of their advanced techniques.
For example, a simple search for a person’s name is unlikely to reveal anything ground-breaking. However, if you start to exclude words, and use some of their advanced operators, things can take a turn for the more interesting.
For example, if you have already looked for a Facebook profile and don’t want these results appearing in your search, you can exclude them by using “-Facebook”. You can obviously do this for a lot of terms, and ultimately widen your net.