Looking for a face? Sites can help

Where do you go to find out whether someone you know has a MySpace, Facebook or Friendster page?

It’s not as simple as you’d think. You can’t just search Facebook and find every person with an account there. Rightly so, Facebook allows users to hide or keep private their accounts.

An advanced search – asking a search engine to find an exact name on a given domain, such as searching for the name “Carl Jones” only on facebook.com – won’t find what you want either.

Several specialized search sites now try to fill the find-someone-on-a- network gap. One we consider useful, though of limited value, is Spock.com. Like a few other sites doing this, such as Wink or Zoominfo, the site goes out and sucks up data from all the major social sites. Then it finds ways to combine or gather the information around the correct identity. Or that’s the logic; it’s not a perfect operation, both in being incomplete and in sometimes getting some information wrong. So use it with caution.

Some network sites, it should be said, also allow full search. LinkedIn, for one, allows you to find any person with an account there. So the answer varies with the social network you’re searching.