John, an old school buddy of mine, happened to be browsing the World Wide Web last week when he came across a Web site with my name and picture. Since we lost track of each other 12 years ago (both having gone into military service and both having changed quite a bit), he e-mailed the Internet address to a mutual friend of ours, Steve. Steve looked it up on the Internet and agreed that it could be me, so John e-mailed me and asked a few questions to verify that I was the Jack Nelson that he use to know.

While I had heard of many people finding lost friends through the Internet, I had never had it happen to me.

We are now trying to locate another friend of ours, Susan. Here is how we will do it.

John knew Susan had an e-mail address with America Online. To search for her e-mail address I went to Four11 and selected "e-mail." Four11 claims to have indexed over 7 million e-mail addresses so far and will add another 3 million by the end of 1996. While 30 - 50 million names will not have been indexed, it is still a good start.

I put in Susan's full name and "aol.com" for the domain name. Since Susan has a common last name and I already knew she was with AOL, it quickly narrowed the search, but I could have done this with just a name.

The domain name that Four11 asks for is the name of the organization that is providing the user e-mail access. For example, since my address is "jack@i-tutor.com," I would have put in "i-tutor.com" for the domain name and the results would have given me back the full address.

Now that I have the list of potential e-mail addresses, I'll check each one to see if any of them are in the state in which Susan lives and e-mail each of those addresses listed.

I also checked to see if she had a home page on America Online by selecting Find AOL Members. She did not.

If none of the e-mail addresses turn out to be her, all is not lost. I have already gone to Switchboard and entered in her name and state. I get back a postal address and phone number for every match that meets my entered criteria.

Another place I try (and get similar, but not identical results) is back at Four11. This time, instead of electing "E-mail," I select "Telephone."

Finally, for both e-mail and street address listings, I can try one more place, WhoWhere. WhoWhere is the same concept as the other two, but may yield different results.

Since all of these search engines base their information on White Page phone listings, the information it provides is only as current as the phone listings and will not show unlisted numbers. Another limitation of phone listings is that it often only shows who initially requested phone service. For example, my name is in the phone books, but my wife is not (although I did request it). Keep in mind that often people use initials instead of their full names, so I could try initials, as well.

If all else fails, I could go with any of the hundreds of investigators online. These places, for a fee of $49 to $150+ will track down anyone (at least that is what they claim). Try Yahoo!'s Investigative Services list for more leads.

Now that John found me, I can give him my address. Better than that, I can give him a map to my house.

By using MapBlast!, "The easiest, fastest way to create your own free, interactive map," I enter in my exact address and it creates a street map for me. I can then e-mail that map directly to John or post it on my Web site.

The unique thing about this map is that it is interactive. I can zoom in and out and move in any direction. The map is always in scale. Best of all, the map can be mailed with a few mouse clicks.

Once John gets this map through e-mail, he can click on it and then have full access to all the functionality of the interactive map. Thus ending another Web success story.