Today's Objectives:

1. Understand how to type in the address www.yahoo.com.

2. Recognize one of the links offered by www.yahoo.com called People Search.

3. Understand that you can locate people all over the United States.

4. Enter correct information to locate people.

DIRECTIONS: You are going to visit www.yahoo.com again like you did in Internet assignment 10. You will need to follow the REFERENCE links at the bottom of the page to PHONE NUMBERS and ADDRESSES.  If you can not find the reference link on your Yahoo home page, you can force it by looking at the address bar.  Note that it says http://www.yahoo.com/.  All you need to do is type reference after the last slash in the address bar and you will be directed to all of the Yahoo reference sites.  This is a real treasure trove of links to information sites. 

There are hundreds of people search sites available on the internet.  It is recommended that you look at three of these for use in this exercise.  Get used to them and explore the others on your own at home.  The three are :

• zabasearch.com
• anywho.com
• yellowpages.com

Look at these but note the anywho site offers you the opportunity to use "starts with a letter for both the first and last names".  This is important for a couple of reasons:

• You may not know how to correctly spell the first or last name of the person you are seeking
• You don't know how the person is listed in the database

An example to explain the last statement follows.  Someone named Mary Jane may be listed as Mary Jane or MJ or M.  If you put in Mary Jane and don't find them they may be listed the other way.  If you put in M, you would find any of the entrys.  The same applies to names like Thomas, who may be listed as Tom or T.  Your thought process should be, If I can not find someone in a People Finder, how can I broaden my search to get more results.  This can include:

• Use an initial instead of a complete first name
• Use only the portion of a last name that you are sure of the spelling
• If you are not sure of the city or zip code where the individual lives, leave it blank and search the entire state.  Narrow down your search from the results you get.
• You almost never put in a street address (that is usually what you are looking for).  Some of the sites do not even have a place to enter addresses.

Type in the first name, last name, city and state. Then  single-click on Search. This will attempt to locate the person you are searching for.  Try  to search for ten relatives, friends or acquaintances. Upon finding those ten people, write down their telephone numbers.

-Note that at most sites, you can do reverse searches.  That is, you can put in a phone number and finds out who belongs to that phone number.  In the Google Search Engine, you can put in a 10 digit phone number, the search tells you who belongs to that phone number and the next click gets you a map of where the person lives who belongs to that phone number.

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