Alright, so I was digging around for info on a ‘Mike Ullman’ the other day, trying to see if an obituary had been posted. You know how it is, sometimes you hear a name, or something just pops into your head. Figured I’d lay out my usual dance when I go hunting for this kind of stuff, ’cause believe me, it ain’t always a walk in the park.
First off, I just jumped on my computer, fired up a search engine. No fancy tricks there, just the usual starting point for most folks, I reckon.
I threw in the obvious search terms. My go-to list usually looks something like this:
- ‘Mike Ullman obituary’
- ‘Mike Ullman death’
- ‘Mike Ullman passed away’
Sometimes I’ll add a year if I have a rough idea, but I started broad.
And what do you get? A whole wall of text, links everywhere. Sifting through that initial dump of results is half the battle, seriously. You get tons of hits, but finding the real, actual information? That’s a different story altogether. Lots of noise out there.
So, I started clicking, you know, opening a few tabs. I was looking for stuff that didn’t immediately scream ‘fake news’ or some kind of ad trap. My first targets are usually legit-looking news sites, or maybe official funeral home pages. Those tend to be more reliable, in my experience.
The big problem, of course, is that a name like ‘Mike Ullman’ isn’t exactly unique. There could be a dozen, a hundred guys with that name. So, the next thing I did was try to get a bit more specific. If I had even a vague idea of a city or a state, I’d chuck that into the search bar. Something like ‘Mike Ullman obituary Texas’ or ‘Mike Ullman California’. That can help cut through some of the clutter, but not always.
I also played around with different combinations of keywords. You’d be surprised, search engines are funny beasts; sometimes, just changing one word can pull up a whole different set of results. It feels a bit stupid that it works that way, but it often does. So I tried things like ‘Mike Ullman memorial’ or ‘Mike Ullman services’.
Then you’ve got all those big, dedicated obituary websites. Some of them are okay, I guess. But a lot of them just seem to scrape information from all over the place, and you can’t always be sure where they got it from. I tend to treat those with a hefty grain of salt unless they clearly link back to a primary source, like a newspaper or a funeral home.
Man, it can be a real pain in the backside sometimes. You really have to wade through so much irrelevant junk. And there are times when the information just isn’t online. Maybe it’s too recent, or maybe the family preferred to keep things private, which is perfectly understandable. You gotta respect that. Not everyone wants their personal affairs plastered all over the web.
I tell ya, the number of times I’ve gone down a rabbit hole looking for someone, spent ages on it, only to find out I had one tiny detail wrong from the start, like a slightly misspelled name or the wrong initial. That kind of thing can drive you nuts, waste a whole lot of time.
Anyway, after a good while poking around, trying different search strings, and sifting through pages for this Mike Ullman thing, you either get lucky and find what you’re looking for, or you hit a dead end. The search process itself, that’s always an interesting little journey for me, regardless of the outcome.
That’s just the way of the web these days, I suppose. So much information floating around, but finding the needle in the haystack – the accurate, relevant piece of info – that’s the real skill. Just thought I’d share my little routine for when I gotta do this kind of digital detective work. You just have to keep at it, be persistent, and maybe you’ll strike gold. Or maybe you won’t. That’s the gamble you take.
