My wife found a wallet on the curb in front of our house. It had about $80 cash, a credit card, and an 18 year old's driver's license from Utah. We figured he was visiting someone in the area, but with a few hundred houses near my home, going door to door didn't seem practical.

I did a Google search on the small town listed on his license and called the local police, hoping they could help me contact his family. No luck (it turns out it was some Utah state holiday and no one answered the phone).

I then did a Google search on the kid's name and got lucky. He'd ran a small web page at his high school and it had an email address. I dropped him an email and he called me that evening. He'd been visiting some friends who lived a couple blocks over and had placed his wallet on the top of his car while doing something. It fell off in front of our house.

We returned the wallet and refused his offer of a reward. We didn't need the money. We wished him a safe trip home (he was leaving the next day) and hope he has good memories of his visit to Colorado. Playing detective and tracking him down was fun.

You might want to put your own name in Google and see what turns up about you (probably more than you think). One part that isn't so good is if you put in your phone number, it gives your name and address. Map Quest and Yahoo Maps will even show a map to your home. There's supposed to be a way to get them to remove your phone listing but I didn't see it.