If you are on the Web, I will find you. I know I’m not the only ‘friendly stalker’ out there. If you are looking for a long lost love, forgotten family member or are just curious if your first grade teacher is still alive, here are some tools to help!

The mighty search engine has allowed us to do so many things. “Mighty” is the operative word, as these same search engines can also curse us all.

If you think about it, any schmuck can find out more about you than you’d like by typing only your first and last name.

Social media has created an explosion of information online.  People are writing on blogs, tweeting, bookmarking, sharing, commenting, etc.

You no doubt want to tap into this wealth of information and learn what people are saying about you, your business, your competitors and the topics you’re interested in.

The challenge is: how to find, filter and process the information you need – the information that will help you do what you want to do.

I touched on the topic of social media monitoring (also known as buzz
monitoring) in my Superlist of Social Media Metrics. Here I’ve gathered a more comprehensive guide to a wide range of resources, websites, services and
advice that will help you find, filter, and monitor the information you need
more effectively.

Google has rolled out a dramatic new feature called “Personalized Search." This new feature impacts all users, even if they are logged out, on the most popular search engine in the world.

Google’s Personalized Search attempts to tailor the search results for a query to each individual based upon the information Google has previously collected for that user. Collected information includes, but is not limited to a user’s geographic location, past search history and websites visited.

Google announced Monday the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results.

Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. "We are here today to announce Google real-time search," Singhal said, calling it "Google relevance technology meets the real-time Web."

Ever wonder what information Google knows about you? With a click or two, now you can find out.

Google released a feature Thursday that lets users see and control data that the web giant has collected about them. Called Google Dashboard, the service provides an online summary of a user's Google files -- Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa photos and so on -- by collecting pre-existing privacy controls in one place.

Also see video about Google Dashboard.

Have a question for the Web? For most surfers, that's a job for Google (GOOG), which claims 64% of online searches. The site has become the go-to reference for hundreds of millions of queries every day.

But there is a growing field of upstart search sites—each with its own bag of tricks. From Microsoft's (MSFT) new Bing search engine to the data-crunching Wolfram|Alpha and the crowd-sourced Hunch, there may be more approaches to asking and answering questions than ever before on the Internet. Can Google retain its dominance of the search business?

Decide for yourself. This BusinessWeek slide show highlights 18 provocative players in online search.

Creative Commons has announced the launch of DiscoverEd, a search engine of “open” educational resources. Open as in as having a CC or other license that makes them more available for use. DiscoverEd is available in beta at http://discovered.creativecommons.org.

The materials in the search engine were not gathered from an open Web crawl; rather they were assembled from third-party repositories like the Open Courseware Consortium and the National Science Digital Library. This means that you won’t get as many results from a general search (and that it’s generally okay to do a more general search) and that the results have somewhat better details.

If you like to search for "music lyrics" or "free" things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And "free music downloads" puts 20 percent of web surfers in harm's way of malicious software, known as "malware."

A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks.

One of the rare services that Google was forced to shut down was Google Answers. Perhaps they anticipated that it was a battle they could not win because getting quick answers to your questions is easier than ever - on Twitter. You can, of course, just ask the question, but we’ve found five sites that try to add some structure to the process, and checked out if they’re worth your time.