If there’s a way to get rich quick these days, it’s the Internet, and I imagine that Abdullah Bakhsh, a junior at Carroll High School and an aspiring computer programmer, hopes he’ll find success in that field someday.

For now, though, he’s finding that the one thing that leads to success in cyberspace – attracting attention – can be hard to achieve.

Less than a month ago, Bakhsh introduced his latest website, something called netsirens.com. The site is the third project that Bakhsh has completed, but his goal with netsirens wasn’t to make money.

“I wanted to make a difference,” Bakhsh said. “I know it sounds corny.” But he wanted to accomplish something that would help people.

The general idea with netsirens is that police and families could post information on missing people on the website. The general public could go to the website and see lists of missing people, and they could also grab what is called a widget on netsirens and put it on their websites.

With the widget installed, whenever someone was reported missing on netsirens, a notice would pop up on websites of people who live in the area where the person has been reported missing.

Bakhsh got the idea when he was riding on the school bus. He noticed a car with a sign on the side. It was someone’s picture and the words, “Have you seen me?”

There must be a better way for people to spread the word about missing family members, Bakhsh thought, and the netsirens idea was born.

What Bakhsh envisioned was a time when someone could post information about a missing person on netsirens and instantly have that information pop up on thousands of websites in the area where the person disappeared.

Then reality intervened. In the few weeks that netsirens has been online, only four people have posted alerts about missing people on his website, and few members of the public have viewed the site or installed his widget.

How would Bakhsh get people to go to his site to report missing people? How would he get the general public to go to his website and install the widget on their sites?

Bakhsh said his school newspaper did a story on the site, and he got a call from something called digitaljournal.com, which wrote an online story about his site.

“I don’t know how to spread the word” about the site, Bakhsh said. He also doesn’t know how to get the word to police departments that might be interested in posting alerts on the site.

“If I had the money I would have paid Google,” which would have posted links to his website on the top of the page whenever someone did a search using certain search terms, Bakhsh said. He could also promote his website on other websites.

But he doesn’t have money, and netsirens isn’t designed to generate money to pay for promoting itself.

So Bakhsh is stumped, and he looks for publicity anywhere he can get it.

Life can be discouraging, but Bakhsh said his father showed him an article about a man who tried to start ventures using the Internet, and his efforts failed 23 times in a row before he found success.

“The people who are up there really keep trying,” Bakhsh said.

It’s a good lesson to learn.