Hidden in Plain Sight

A few years ago, I remember using a search engine that was not Google. I was looking up a few people I went to college with. In particular, I remember searching for a guy named Peter Zenge. Pete was from North Carolina. His dad was a music professor at UNC, who played the piano. Pete was trying to decide between majoring in physics and majoring in computer science. He picked physics, and then realized he didn't care that much for it, but as it turns out, physics, like many other science majors had cut down its requirements, allowing students to pick other areas to round out their knowledge. He picked econ, and that was that.

This webpage, as I recall, was from someone he had gone to school with, either middle school or high school. Pete's dad had a visiting position in Taiwan, and he had enrolled in some American school over there. He had a PC back in the days when such things were novel, and presumably, showed this to his friends in Taiwan, and this was remarkable enough for the guy to write a webpage, back when such things were novel.

That webpage disappeared. It is presumably lost in the annals of time, except search engines, at one point, must have indexed it. I had once suggested that to Google that they archive everything so you could do a "Google Wayback". You would enter a query and a date, and then it would give you the results that Google would have produced at the time. Of course, those pages would be missing, but if there was some partial record of that, even that would be cool.

There is archive.org, but it's slow, and doesn't have good coverage. I know. There are sites that try to prevent themselves from being recorded by search engines, which I think is too bad. I understand webpages can ultimately stay around so long that you may regret an indiscreet post, but I think it will be an interesting source of data that future generations may want to explore, provided the web's format doesn't change drastically (HTML, good or bad, is still around).

Peter had the advantage that his name was a bit unusual. Not so much his first name, but his last name. There's record of him from the late 90s, but nothing very recent. In fact, it's a bit easier to find his dad on the web more recently.

And that's interesting, because he's got a little web presence that's mostly disappeared. There are those who have a ton of web presence. They want their lives to be on the Internet. There are those where almost no information exists. There are far more people, for example, using instant messenging than you can query about. Find someone's unique screen name and then Google it. Odds are you'll find no information on it. This may be privacy at work. I used to get spammed when I had ICQ and that was years ago.

These days, I don't get spammed on IM, presumably since most IMs require permission before getting added.

I found someone I knew in college, but for a while, I had no information on his whereabouts other than he went to UCLA to do a M.S. in computer science. There was some indication of this, and nothing else. Every once in a while, I'd make the Google query. Then, a few years ago, I found a page he had written on anime, and was able to get in touch that way.

Tracking down someone on the web is a bit like cyberstalking, and there's sort of an art to trying to get this information, looking at multiple search engines, hoping some variation of words will trigger the result you want. Of course, there are pay services that claim they can track people for you, but I'm not that serious about it.

I grew up in an age before instant messaging, and therefore, having everyone's SN from college is uncommon. I know people who have sworn off IM, convinced it eats up too much time. And my parent's generation don't even see the appeal of such a thing. Who would they talk to? Why not use a phone? It's a foreign thing to them, even as it's so utterly common among college students now.

I'm curious how social networking will evolve. Already, you see teens who think nothing of having their lives public knowledge. They put their plans throughout the day. They want people to call them. The paranoid parent would think kids are setting themselves up for unwanted attention, and I suppose that's possible, but there are, I'd imagine that those who are interested in such ill will are far outnumbered by those who want their iternary available to all.

If more people become more open about their lives, will it become trivial for me to find people I knew once upon a time? Will I even lose touch with them? In fact, am I likely to lose touch even as they are right there in my contact list? How many people do you regularly talk to on your contact list? Some keep their list tiny. Others have massive lists, of which they contact only a few.

We live in a virtual world that's becoming disconnectedly connected.