old friends

in a bit of a long-weekend distraction, i tried looking up old friends and classmates on google. it is a good reminder of how generally ineffective that is, and why you shouldn't believe anyone who tries to sell you on the idea that looking up prospective dates or customers or whatever on google is some big fad. someone who has their own website, or participates on publically-archived mailing lists or forums, will likely turn up all over the place (like i do), but for a great many people, you’re lucky if google turns up the results from some charity race that happens to have a participant with the name you're searching for, some entry from a genealogy database, or a number of other similarly-named people.