With all the e-mail scams, spyware and viruses, it's easy to write off the Internet as just another bit of modern technology gone horribly wrong.
But that's a shortsighted view. Consider a couple of recent mysteries that were resolved because of Internet technology.
Thanks to the search engine Google, and equally to the savvy people who put it to use, a hit-and-run victim who went unidentified for 11 years was identified last week.
David Glen Lewis of Amarillo, Texas, was found to be the pedestrian whose body was discovered in 1993 in Moxee, Wash., a small town outside Yakima. His remains went unidentified all this time because the Texan was not known to have any connection with the small Northwestern town.
Authorities in both towns used all the normal search tools available to law enforcement in an unsuccessful effort to track Lewis.
Then an officer from the Washington State Patrol began searching Google after reading a news story about unsolved missing person cases.
Before long, he found a photo of a pair of glasses similar to one owned by Lewis on websites belonging to the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Doe Network, a volunteer group that tracks missing persons. A DNA test subsequently matched Lewis to his mother.
Another story has a happier ending. Two women, one from Arizona and one from Alabama, met in a message forum at a website offering support to families who adopted children from China.
They discovered their toddlers came from the same orphanage, had been abandoned the same day, and they each had a cleft palate. The coincidences led them to order DNA tests, which showed the two children were twins.
The two families, who each have two other children besides their Chinese adoptees, told the Associated Press their children's genetic relationship has brought them closer together. One said that when people ask her how many children she has now, she'll have to say "three and a half."
It's gratifying to hear stories like this — and they more than make up for having to occasionally delete an "important business proposition from the former premier of Nigeria."