When I speak to parents across the country, I get a lot of questions from parents that go something like this:

• How can I search for my child’s pictures online?
• How can I search for hidden social profiles that my child has created online?
• How can I find out what others are saying about my child or what my child is saying about others?
• Is there an easy way to check up on my Childs online activity and what others can see?

Well our good old friend Google is here to help and in this article I will share a few quick tips that will help parents search and find information that their children and their children’s friends may be hiding online.

Google Image Search

Google image search is the best way to search the internet for images of your child.

Below are some tips that will allow you to uncover images of your child that you might not find otherwise.

• Link to Google Image Search: http://www.google.com/imghp
• Search with full name first, and then add modifiers such as school name, city name.
• It might be scary – but if you really want to see the real results turn of safe search next to the search box.
• Search with activity name such as sport team.
• Search for screen names that your child uses.
• Link to Google Advanced Image Search: http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search
• Use advanced search to zero in on only “face” pictures.
• Use advanced search to only search social sites like facebook.com or myspace.com.
• Clicking on the image will send you to the page that it exists on. This will allow you to see the context of the image if you do find images of your child.
• Search for your children’s friends as well, you never know when you child will end up in the picture.

General Google Search Tricks

Many of the same tricks that we used above are also great for finding information about your child using the regular Google search functions on regular web pages.

• Search for screen names or nicknames that your child uses.
• Search for your child’s name along with modifiers such as sports teams, school or anything else you can think of that might lead you to your child.
• Use the advanced search tool to only search social sites like facebook.com or myspace.com to really zero in on those social sites.
• Again, search for your children’s friends.

The Way Back Machine

The way back machine is what is called a digital time-capsule that literally keeps a record of the entire internet. In fact it has even been used in lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

If you kids ever need evidence that what they do online will never be erased or go away, just show them The Way Back Machine: http://www.archive.org/

The Way Back Machine is most useful for checking out past versions of blogs or profile pages on some sites. Currently they are not keeping any versions of facebook pages.

Isn’t This Spying on my kids?

Now some of you may be thinking – “Hey, isn’t this spying”? And I say no absolutely not. Because the fact is that all of the info that you can find by using the above techniques is available to anyone with a internet connection – including online predators.