The last day of school came. You and your friends could hide the excitement. Finally, you are done with school. You would have sworn that you and your school friends would be together forever. After a few months, calls and communication started to break down to fade over the years finally.
This guide is aimed at assisting you in finding a long-lost school friend online. There are ways to do just that on the internet, and it’s free of charge.
Before diving into methods of locating your friend, you will need the tools to do so. This is information like the name of your school you both attended, last known address, last known phone number, occupation, social security number (if you are familiar with it), age, interests, and other such information you can find on your friend.
You will need to write down these details as they will come in handy as you search. TotallyFreePeopleSearch.org provides more helpful information with regards to this. You can also use their people search engine and white pages for the lookup.
Start with a Google Search
Google supports searches with most of the information listed above. Name searches on Google have proven to be a bit problematic. Regular searches usually bring back dozens if not hundreds of results on common names.
This can be solved easily by including other details like age, middle name, occupation, interests to filter the results. To search, enter the name on the search bar followed by the friend’s location (city, state), age, occupation, etcetera in quotation marks and search.
Searches with these options are possible on other search engines such as Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Bing.
Check Out Alumni Sites
It is usually not the case that all high schools have their own website. If the school you and your long-lost friend attended have one, then it’s an advantage. To find your school site, go to any search engine, type the name of your school, the state and city it’s located, and search.
Once you have located it, find its alumni page to search from.
Other sites to consider for a high school alumni search include Alumni Class and Classmates. College and universities have alumni associations that can help you locate your long-lost friend. These are some of the ways you can find people for free online.
The Power of Social Media
Social media sites have emerged as the best communication and information source platforms over the years. Such platforms include Facebook and LinkedIn, which can be very handy in finding your long-lost friend.
Facebook allows searches with name, username, phone number, residential address, email address, location, and occupation. There might also be pages and groups on Facebook in your school where you can look up your friend.
You can also try searching on Facebook using mutual friends. If you have a friend on Facebook whom you suspect might be in contact with your long-lost friend, you might try searching from their profile.
LinkedIn is another social media platform that cannot be ignored. With close to a billion users, LinkedIn is ideal for finding old colleagues for reunions. LinkedIn is also a group feature that most universities and colleges use for alumni.
These are some of the methods there to find a long-lost school friend online. If these yield no positive results, you can try the services of private investigators. Private investigators are professionals who have countless sources to enable them to locate just about anyone.
Snowballing
You can try to find one piece of information mentioned earlier in the article and then use the piece to find another piece of information. For example, you can find out someone’s birthday and then use it to find another detail until you have everything you need to get hold of your long-lost school friend.
