Kansas City, Mo. ? Investigators looking for a boy who disappeared from a Butler County, Kan., home a decade ago searched another house Wednesday and planned to scour a wooded area along a river this weekend.

Butler County Sheriff Craig Murphy refused to say how the home searched on Wednesday was connected to the disappearance of then-11-year-old Adam Herrman in 1999. But Wichita media reported that Doug and Valerie Herrman, Adam’s adoptive parents, lived in the rural house in neighboring Sedgwick County after moving from Towanda.

The Herrmans have said Adam ran away from their home in Towanda in 1999 but they did not report him missing because they assumed he had connected with a sibling or gone back to his biological parents.

But relatives of the Herrmans have said the couple told them the boy was returned to the state Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services.

The disappearance became public knowledge last week when authorities announced that they had been searching for a boy who had been missing for nearly a decade.

Murphy said the search will move Saturday to the Whitewater River and an adjacent wooded area outside Towanda. No specific tip led investigators to the river, he said.

Even as they search related areas, Murphy said his office also was trying to wade through a flood of e-mail and telephone tips since Monday, when he held a news conference announcing details about the case, including the boy’s name.

Five of the Butler County’s eight detectives are actively working on the case, with some help from the county attorney’s office, Sedgwick County and the state Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, he said.

Tips are coming in from around the U.S., he said, and some include photos from the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook that the senders believe match a computer-enhanced photo showing what Adam might look like if he is alive.