MIDDLETOWN, Conn. -- A Middletown woman said she found her missing chocolate lab-Weimaraner mix with just the click of a mouse after the dog took off last week.

"He took a left down the street and that was it," resident Emily Hagerty said. "We couldn't find him. He was gone."

As a rescue dog, Hagerty said, Max is afraid of people and cars, which had her concerned about how he would cope on his own.

But then, she said, she found findtoto.com, which got her neighbors involved in the search for her beloved Max.

"I got about five calls within the first 10 minutes," Hagerty said. "The one guy did call and say, 'I found your dog, but I couldn't catch him.'"

In an area that's full of people and places for a dog to run, she said she was sure someone would spot Max.

"It gave us some hope that he was actually out there, because we didn't know how far he would run," Hagerty said.

Encouraged that he was OK, she said her family kept searching and found Max the next morning after logging on to the Web site.

"And I just kind of jumped out of the car with his squeaky toy and started squeaking it and he ran right into my legs," Hagerty said. "He knew who was calling him."

In this case the service worked, but it's important to be careful when money's involved.

In the fall, the Channel 3 I-Team exposed a company call Petfinders Alert, based out of Nevada.

"Nobody that I talked to had received a call, and it was discouraging," said Margo Clark, of Tolland.

Clark said she paid $60 to Petfinders so they would call her neighbors to alert them about her missing cat. She said they never did.

But Hagerty said findtoto.com was great. She said she'll use it again if Max takes off.

"I went on findtoto.com and you can put that you found your dog," she said. "It's a happy ending. He came home."