The Real Extent of the Web…
The following contains excerpts from (and is very much based on) an article by Noah Masterson that appeared in the online rag Rush Magazine way back in 2000.
I am easy to track down. Type my name into any search engine and you’ll find enough pages to choke a hippo. Try it: Google • MSN • AltaVista
Most of those search results are links to members of a couple of wholesale webrings that I used to manage; the owners of those websites were too lazy to remove my banner when I gave up control a few YEARS ago. A few of the results are links to perverted pages and comments created by a crazed stalker who has become obsessed with me during the past year. Other links are to this richard’s ramblings… website or other websites I own and manage, and still more relate to either my duties as a notary public or to my hobbies of geocaching or confluencing. With one search, it would be easy to cobble together some notion of what I’ve been doing for the past few years — if one were curious enough.
But why can’t I find information on any of my old friends? Or, for that matter, my current friends. Or girls I had crushes on in junior high. Or that girl who used to give me a ride to school every day in her beaten-up VW beetle. A few examples:
Example #1 — Margo. A girl I worked with fifteen years ago that I lost track of when I went off to college. Nothing. Nothing, that is, except a mention on my own website…
Example #2 — Kim. Another girl I worked with twelve years ago. The last news I remember was that she was getting separated from her second (or was it third?) marriage. She’s had more last names that I have had cars, but I can’t find a mention of any one them on the web. Maybe she’s re-married…
Example #3 — Kristin. My next-door neighbor when I was in elementary school. The last time I remember seeing her was when I was a senior in high school and she was an entering sophomore cheerleader type. There is absolutely nothing about her on the web. I’ve tried variations of her last name, too, in case my brain is flawed. Nothing.
The list goes on.
I’ve searched for every girl I’ve been involved with or wanted to be involved with (the latter being a much longer mental list than the former). I’ve searched for kids who beat me up. I have turned up nothing.
Two questions arise: “Why am I trying to find these people?” and “Why am I failing at it?”
To answer the first question, my intentions are pure. I have a genuine interest in what people from my past are doing, and yet I have no desire to contact them. I would like to be able to say, “I knew them before they were (fill in the blank, e.g. famous/in prison/dead/addicted to internet gambling).”
The second question is more perplexing. Why am I failing? I am generally good at finding information on the Internet. “Seconds, man, seconds!” So I cannot chalk up my failure to incompetence. It could be that the Internet is not as far-reaching as we’ve been led to believe. We’re in an era when, supposedly, everyone and their twin grandmother has a gøddámn website. But maybe that’s a myth. Maybe we don’t all have personal homepages. No. Given the endless search results I’ve encountered on my quest, I am convinced everyone and their grandmother do have a personal homepage — all except the people I’m actually looking for.
But the Internet will someday prevail. I will eventually find out if girls who might have dated me if I’d only had the courage to ask are now models or congresswomen or brain surgeons or war criminals. I will find out if the years have been cruel or kind to the kids with whom I played basketball at the YMCA in the ’70s. I will find out who succeeds, who fails, and who dies young.
And they will never know.
Perhaps there are some things you really don’t want to know. On a lark I once, uh, no. That sounds too light hearted. In a moment of boredom? Out of idle curiosity? Nudged by the same thing that makes me wonder what happens if I push this button, perhaps? For what ever reason, in an idle moment I once typed the name of an ex-girlfriend (with whom things did not by any stretch of the imagination end “well”) into a search engine. Her name came up in the first listing found. Her full name. Her married name. Ow.
We’re a bit luckier in the UK when it comes down to searching for those you once had a crush on or walked to school with. http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk is a great place to start looking. It has since branched out into other countries such as New Zealand and Ireland but not as far as I can see into the USA. The site is extremely popular not only with the ease of which you can locate old friends and school teachers but also for the national newspapers who like to report on incidents of rekindled love. I must admit to using it to find not only the old friends but also as a “what are they doing now?” on old girlfriends. Regards Nick.W