As I was researching this column, I was reminded of the movie Old Boyfriends.
The movie wasn't memorable, but the premise was: A psychologist analyzes her life by finding her past friends and lovers.
We may keep in touch with special friends from the past, but there are many more who disappear into the void of time and distance. Like most folks, I occasionally lapse into a reverie of ''What ever happened to . . .?''
Only a few years ago, that question would require considerable time and money to answer. Today, it might be answered after only a couple of hours searching some new databases on the World Wide Web.
Since more people have phone numbers than have e-mail addresses, phone listings are a good place to start. Three companies have attempted to round up as many phone listings as they can find and combine them into national telephone databases.
Switchboard (http://www.switchboard.com) offers a database of more than 90 million people and 11 million businesses. You can search the entire United States or narrow it to a state or town.
Switchboard was created by Banyan Systems, the networking people. It opened for business in February, and the company says the site is registering more than 4 million hits a day.
Reunion stories
The company also has an archive of interesting reunion stories: the person who found a credit card in the mall and located the owner on Switchboard; the man who failed to track down a childhood friend using a private detective but succeeded with Switchboard.
Lookup USA (http://www.lookupusa.com) claims 88 million households and 11 million businesses. Primarily aimed at the business community, the site is maintained by American Business Information Inc. of Omaha, Neb., which collects and distributes information about businesses: credit ratings, company statistics, that sort of thing. (The company also sells its telephone database on CD-ROM, called ''The Ultimate Phone Book.'')
The smallest company aiming at the ''white pages'' market is World Yellow Pages (http://wyp.net), called ''Whip-Net'' for short. Wyp.Net is run from the California home of one of its founders. It claims to have more than 105 million residential and business listings.
Which is the best? I tested each site by trying to find myself. At Switchboard, I found myself at an old address on the East Coast, but not my current year-old Cincinnati-area address. Lookup USA had me in the Cincinnati area but not my street address or phone. I wasn't able to find myself at all on Wyp.Net.
Even Yahoo!, which has staked out a big piece of the Internet indexing business, has jumped on the people directory bandwagon. It offers a Yahoo! people search (http://www.yahoo.com/search/people) that provides addresses and phone numbers.
Yahoo! same as 411.Com
Yahoo!'s database was provided by Database America, which offers it's own search site, 411.Com (http://www.four11.com). So the results at Yahoo! and 411.Com are the same. 411.Com also had me listed only at my old East Coast address.
411.Com combines both telephone and e-mail directories; its primary emphasis is e-mail. The company claims to have 6.5 million e-mail addresses in its database. I easily found two of my three e-mail addresses.
411.Com's main competitor in the e-mail directory business is Bigfoot (http://www.bigfoot.com). Bigfoot found only my America Online e-mail address.
E-mail Charles Brewer with questions, comments and suggestions at cbrewer@enquirer.com.