Find People with LongTimeLost.Com
Long Time Lost has a fairly clever system for helping to track down people you’ve lost contact with.
Essentially, the site creates a public page for the person you’re looking for like this. Then if/when the person you’re looking for Google’s his or her own name, hopefully the page will show up relatively high in the rankings and the person will visit the page and respond.
There would seem to be a number of problems with his approach. The first is the huge likelihood of name duplication. For example, if someone out there has lost touch with a different Brian Carnell (and there are several people who share my name), they’re going to have a hard time ever having that bubble anywhere near the top of the Google results for that name (since I pretty much own the first few hundred results).
Second, even without the name duplication, it seems unlikely the LongTimeLost.Com page is going to have a very high page rank. Anyone who has ever had to try to find someone using Google has probably noticed that most of the results you tend to get are from genealogy sites which have high page ranks for someone who died 150 years ago with the same name as the person you’re looking for.
Especially given how scary easy it is to use to track down people through online databases (albeit at a small cost), this would seem to have a limited chance at success. But then I could be completely wrong. It would be interesting if the site would publish simple stats of # of people who have clicked on the # of people in the database vs. the number who have clicked on the “hey, that’s me” link.
Regardless, a creative use of Google.
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