Use 123people to find your old friends online

Google’s really good at finding things – ­ facts and figures, reports and references, maps and photographs and so on. It’s not so good at finding people. That’s partly because there are so many of us who share the same, or similar, names and partly because what it chooses to search makes it possible for anyone, even someone with an active presence on the web, to slip under the radar.A dedicated people-finder works differently, searching through millions of publicly available documents stored online, social-networking sites, blogs, forums and bulletin boards, news sites ­ – even Amazon wishlists – ­ to find the person you are looking for. Of course, they can’t find everyone, but a site like 123people is always worth a try.