The first thing to do is figure out your lost friend's name. If you were high school or college mates, a look at your yearbook photos can be a simple solution. If this option is not possible, figure out whether any family members or friends might be able to help with the photo. Chances are somebody else who knew them will have knowledge of their whereabouts, and if not, they might give hints that could lead to further information.

Type their name into a search engine, such as Google.com, Yahoo.com or Bing.com. Put their name in quotation marks to maximize results. If you know the state that they live in, you can type this in after their name. This will narrow your search enormously.

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter or MySpace are effective ways to locate lost friends. Thousands of people have joined these popular sites and searching for their name on the site and then comparing their profile pictures with your photo is an excellent option to try. If you are struggling, look for groups from your high school, college or work place. If you manage to find their family members or mutual friends that you shared, send them a message and perhaps you can exchange photographs and gain valuable information to their whereabouts or how you could contact them.

Many people are members of people-finding websites, such as FriendsReunited.co.uk, Reunion.com or Classmates.com. Plenty of these types of websites are free to join. Similarly, you can try Pipl.com, a meta-search engine that can find people using several public databases.

It might seem a long shot, but searching in the white pages directory for personal information is worth a try. You can use an directory.