Thanks to the World Wide Web, getting in touch with your old college buddies is no longer a burdensome task. One of the biggest perks of the internet is connectivity. Today, it is nearly impossible for anyone to not have digital data trails. These are important cyber clues that can help you track down long-lost friends and revive those cherished relationships.
Here are proven resources to find your college friends online in a few easy steps.
Search engines are the number one source of information, no matter what you want to find. And Google leads the pack with 95.03% and 81.92% share of the mobile and desktop search markets, respectively.
There are several advantages to using a search engine such as Google. Remember, the internet hosts billions of web pages, if not more. Scanning each one in search of your college friends is not something you can humanly achieve. But Google can make your life easier and get the job done on your behalf.
It crawls and indexes nearly all web pages online to match them against your search query and show the most relevant results. Not only that, Google does this at lightning speed. It also crawls the web every day to ensure it displays the most updated content for you.
However, web authors and publishers can prevent the search giant from crawling certain pages. For instance, some social media platforms let you hide your profile from search engines. If you enable this feature, your profile and activity will not turn up on Google’s SERPs.
There could be other reasons for pages not getting indexed. Google can, for example, leave out content that it considers to be of low quality. An estimated 16% of indexable content on well-known websites will not show up on search results due to this reason.
All these practices could limit the information you can access when you are attempting to locate an old college friend. But not to worry, we have several other resources to help improve your search efforts further.
To search for your friend on Google, list down all relevant information you can remember. It can include their first and last names, birth year, college name, and workplaces. Then type in different combinations of these details on Google’s search bar. Remember to use open and close quotation marks to find exact phrase matches.
With 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most widely used social media platforms on the planet.
It came into the picture during the early stages of social media hype, giving it an early advantage in attracting older demographics. As a result, the majority of Facebook users are older than the crowds you will find on sites such as TikTok, which is mainly patronized by those aged 18 and below.
The median age of Facebook users is estimated to be 32 years. This makes the platform ideal for finding friends from your college days.
To start your search, log in to your Facebook account and type in your friend’s name on the search bar. The platform will list down all profiles that match your search query. If your friend’s Facebook profile is not set up for private viewing, it will definitely be listed under the results. You can also try different combinations of your friend’s details to improve your search outcomes.
In addition, many colleges have official and unofficial alumni groups and communities on Facebook. So, it is worth checking whether your college or batch has one, too. If you are lucky, you might find some of your friends there or at least get to know someone who could put you in touch with them.
This social media platform currently has in excess of 900 million users. At first glance, this is no match for Facebook’s user figures. However, LinkedIn is a professional networking site. So, it only attracts the working-age demographic, not the younger population. This makes it a useful tool for finding college friends through their professional profiles.
Most users on LinkedIn list work and educational details together with contact information. Therefore, you can search for friends by name, college, or organizations they used to work at when they were in college.
Classmates
This site hosts yearbooks of 470,000 colleges on a single platform, allowing you to search them by state, city, college, and year.
If your friends have registered with Classmates, you can find them through a free search. You can also sign up for a free account on the site, allowing your college buddies to discover you easily. Signing up also enables you to reach out to your classmates if you find someone you know or who could connect you with a friend.
The platform offers public message options, too. This is an excellent tool for leaving behind a message to let others know who you are searching for.
PhoneHistory
If you still have your college buddy’s phone number and if it is now used by someone else, PhoneHistory is the best place to start your search.
This platform provides the full history of phone numbers, which includes information about current and previous registered users. What type of details can it find for you? Based on public sources, PhoneHistory can get you names, locations, email addresses, social media, and workplace information—invaluable data to track down your friends.
The platform’s extensive database covers information about over 500 million US phone numbers, improving your chances of finding clues to your friends’ whereabouts. And all the data is regularly updated to ensure you get accurate and up-to-date details.
Wrapping Up
Finding someone you have lost touch with would have been nearly impossible a few decades ago. But in today’s data age, the entire search process is simplified, cutting down time and effort by leaps and bounds.
So, if you want to reconnect with old college friends, the internet can make things much easier. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates, and PhoneHistory are excellent platforms for you to get started. They each have unique strengths and expertise that will help improve search results and discover those long-lost friends in no time.