by Jo Woodnutt

Created on: November 18, 2009

Facebook is a worldwide phenomenon connecting friends and relatives from all walks of life. Setting up a facebook account is easy, but sometimes the hardest bit can be finding your friends among the millions of users. However, it is totally possible- I have recently found myself back in touch with someone I haven't spoken to since we met on holiday 8 years ago! I didn't know his surname or even his location- just an approximate age and his dad's surname. It was a long trawl, and I ended up emailing a lot of people with his name who turned out not to be him, but I did find him, in the end!

The easiest way to find a friend is to search for one. In the top right of the facebook page (either home or profiles or settings, it doesn't matter) there is a search box, and in here you can type a name. Facebook will give you a list of all the results for that search. As an example, I used the name "Jane Smith", and received about 25,000 results. These will be in order of relevance to your search (how many words are the same) but with any results with whom you share mutual friends at the top, in order of how many friends you share. Of course, when you first start you won't have any friends, so there won't be any mutual friends to help you, so you could be in for a long trawl. However, facebook has made it easier by letting you narrow the search using the toggles on the left side (selecting "people" only shows people, not groups, pages or applications, so narrows your search). You can also filter by location, school and workplace above your search results once you are in the "people" tab. These are notoriously untrustworthy- they only know what information your friends have put in, so if they haven't said what school they go/went to, or where they live, they won't be found by this search.

Handily, facebook can display some of their information if their security settings allow it- their picture is usually the easiest thing to recognise, but in case you haven't seen them for a while or need confirmation, their networks, locations and schools/universities may be visible. Again, this depends on what they entered into their profile- just because it doesn't say that they went to your school doesn't mean they didn't, they might just not have made that information public, or entered it at all.

As I have already said, once you have one or two friends, finding more becomes a lot simpler. Not only does the facebook search show you whether the "Jane Smith" you are searching for has

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