the autoGoogler

by m. werneburg, 2002

This page outlines one of my inventions—the autogoogler mechanism for finding people with whom you've lost contact.

First, some background. I move around a fair bit. Mostly due to the precarious nature of the IT job market over the past few years but also because I have more than a bit of wanderlust. I mean, I've currently living in my 15th 'permanent' home. I've therefore lost touch with a lot of people, even if those people don't move around much themselves. I can lose people just by tossing my cellphone into storage, for instance. Of course, once you've lost touch, it can be tricky finding someone again.

This is a pain in the ass, as I like to meet up with friends and acquantainces.

Then I thought up a way to use the Internet to get in touch with old friends. The Internet is, by and large, pretty hopeless for finding people. Not many people put any details about themselves on the 'net, and most people have names that are not unique (I've found three or four other guys with the name Michael Werneburg!). But:

I can post anything I like to my web site.
Google indexes my site fairly regularly.

Therefore the Google search engine has my site in it.

Since it's an easy—and not even obnoxiously self-obsessive—thing to punch one's own name into Google, it stands to reason that I can get people to find my website simply by putting their name on my website. So that's what I did. I put together a page with a list of names of people I'd like to hear from again, and a note telling them how to get ahold of me.

Then I sat back and waited. After a while, it occurred to me that the people I had in mind—most of whom I haven't seen in a decade or two—might not remember me. So I put in some context for each person. A simple description of how we were connected and when went in beside each name.

Sure enough, it worked.

First was Richard Seabright, a fellow I'd gone to University with, and with whom I'd worked on a job just out of University.

Next was a fellow calling himself Satan MacNuggit sent me a simple note that pointed to his web site. It was Jonathan Culp—a good friend from early childhood: kindergarten to grade two.

Then a second friend from those days—Paul Haskins—contacted me.

I've since met with Paul and Jon, and have swapped email with Rich threatening to get together.

In all, I'm pretty pleased with my autogoogler. You can see it here.