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People Were More Likely To Google Themselves This Year
Ponca City, We Love You writes "More than twice as many Americans googled themselves in 2006 than five years previous — and many are googling their friends and romantic interests as well, according to a report released ecently by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The survey shows that the percentage of US adult Internet users who have looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine has more than doubled in the past five years (pdf) from 22 percent in August, 2001 to 47 percent in December, 2006. Only 3 percent of internet self-googlers say they Google themselves regularly, 22 percent say 'every once in a while,' and three-quarters say they have googled themselves once or twice. The original report, 'Digital Footprints,' contains many more interesting observations (pdf)."
I hear they have that on computers now.
Wow... Deja Vu... didn't I just see this story the other day?
how many knew enough to put it in quotations?
FYI: I don't know what you guys are talking about half the time.
people were always more likely to ___________ themselves this year
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Where is everybody? Has everyone gone home for the holidays? And where are the myminicity trolls?
I've been googling myself at a pretty steady frequency since about the time I turned 13!
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
When I was younger I would sometimes Google myself 2-3 times a day.
But I'm older now, the passion is gone, and I'm lucky to get one off once or twice a week.
Am I the only person who has actively concealed themselves from prying online eyes?
I've been a pretty affluent internet creature since the mid 90's (yes, a latecomer in this crowd, I understand) and since my first forays onto the www I've filled-out registration information with bogus info. Having done this for more than a decade, I can in fact google myself, but only via usernames and other pseudonyms.
Even my myspace and facebook profiles are semi-bogus. I understand that certain high-profile instances will launch your true identity into the limelight (any bit of media publicity for example), but I constantly hear about individuals who are googleable, not because of a media instance, but simply because they have placed themselves into the great index.
Who has willfully made themselves searchable, and why? I have enjoyed a fruitful, successful life in the IT industry this whole time and I have not yet needed to put my personal info into a publicly searchable and available location.
What are the benefits? I ask, because to me, being a very private person, I see mostly, maybe overwhelmingly, negative results.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Apparently I'm not a writer but a prolific techno god in Russia. This is exciting news.
I much prefer having other people google me. So much more satisfying.
You theory sucks.
If it might be potentially embarrassing to you in the future, either get over it or don't do it in public. Other people (sometimes your 'friends') will put it up for you. Plain and simple.
How do they know that people are googling themselves??????
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I googled myself but none of the search results are about me. Apparently there is a musician with the same name and all the results are about him.
usually find some interesting stuff, and google images always has the best pics of me. (SafeSearch is Off)
I google myself every now and then to check that I'm first for my name in Google and Google Images. It helps long lost friends find me. Better than trying to guess which social networks I'm in.
Of course, Slashdot's page rank can only help here, hence this comment :)
For those of you that think I'm a Perl programming asshole though, feel free to help build that little googlebomb ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
upon finding themselves in the Google listings? More than 99.9999999% of us are just "ordinary", unspectacular beings. Conceit, delusion and illusion makes us think we are more or worth more than we really rate.
By the same token, I rate the populace more valuable than most politicians, as the are extraordinary, but extraordinarily super-conceited...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I happen to "google" myself in the shower every morning, but it's not exactly newsworthy.
Is it good or bad that the top google results for your handle (tyrus sithius) are from razor 1911 greets from 1996?
I googled my real name and just saw other people's successes......
With all those viruses hanging around. GTD Googly Transmitted Disease
Interestingly enough the vast majority of links to my name on Google lead to pages about a low 'B' list actor- who happened to appear in Star Wars in a single scene...
Last year, googling my own name was fun, because it actually turned up a few interesting things I had almost forgotten about. This year, despite the fact that there are several pieces of open source software released under my real name, and hundreds of mailing list posts, most of the results appear to be useless pages in Ubuntu's Launchpad. Which I didn't even use, except for reporting a few bugs...
Self Googling will make you blind.
I haven't had much luck searching for people on google. Its just too hard to find info on the right firstname lastname. Using facebook to find out about people is far easier. Even if you only have a first name and know they are local it is fast. I do it all the time. After I meet a girl at the bar, I'll always look her up on facebook before I call her up. It works both ways though, and can be pretty scary sometimes. I went out on a date with a girl last month and she knew everything about me. I was very weird ... a real turn off. So I would advise anyone to keep their facebook/google intellegence quiet.
They did a phone survey and just asked people.
Cmdr Taco googling himself would come up with 5 million references to "Lame". :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
ever since I found that a not-so-clueful university researcher at my school published my name-SSN combo (gotten from the university Database) by googling myself.... luckily it was shut-down quickly
Since I have a pretty rare name, I created a Google alert with my name.
I receive around one mail every week.
I guess this makes me a continuous self-googler since 2 years.
...that issues like privacy only seem get some serious thought from the masses when topics like these surface from time to time. That is, for those who actually manage to think beyond "I have nothing to hide", to me also known as "See no evil, hear no evil".
If you had a cat5 hanging from your rear while typing out URLs with your nipples and navle, I'd say it was!
People who read articles about Googling themselves are more likely to Google themselves. It's self a fulfilling article!
My name (Chinese) is "She MaTing".
[Ben Stein Voice]That sounds diiiiirty[/Ben Stein Voice]
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Self Googling has been discovered to cause cancer.
A mechanic
A writer
A photographer
A director of Rolls Royce
A mortgage provider
oooh. A War correspondent!
Deleted
This article is almost identical to one from 1977, except that one said:
"More than twice as many Americans xeroxed themselves in 1976 than five years previous -- and many are xeroxing their friends and romantic interests as well, according to a report released recently by the Pew Copyrigh and American Life Project.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Man, if I could google myself, I'd never leave the house.
these things happen to other people
Yourself googles you.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
I have even a good example...I was participating in a thread, right here on Slashdot...Some outsourcing thing, I have no idea.
This is the thread in particular...It was in a random outsourcing thread, so you can imagine the level of comments. Mine in particular are pretty much devoid of racial content...I reserve my true hatred for Dell, and that's pretty much why I jumped into a semi-OT thread about tech support.
Week or so later I start getting nasty emails, calling me a racist. Arrooo? I have vices, but that's not one of them. So I start looking around and quite quickly find "http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1326921,prtpage-1.cms" an article singling out me in particular for some of the semi-racist yammering that was going on in that thread. If you bother to read the article (which I don't recommend as it's pretty much "look at how evil all americans are" and filled with the sort of good reporting that can misquote a forum post) you'll see that the out-of-context quote attributed to me was from the parent post, and I hadn't even quoted him. Typical.
So I know how this crap goes, and I'm not particularly offended that someone has smeared an internet handle of mine, but, as things do on the internet, it persists...It even came right back around on Slashdot with some Indian user quoting it as gospel truth and evidence that we're all complete racists.
Sigh.
So yea, you can try to associate good stuff with your handle, but someone else is free to associate whatever they want to it as well, and truth, no truth, it doesn't really matter if people want to believe the lie. What if this handle was associated with my name? I get looked up, and apparently I'm some kinda racist. If you were concerned about it and searched me and racism, that's the only hit.
So yea, protect your identity. The good that you do is buried with you, but the bad stuff will live forever...even if you didn't do it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I am Googling YOU right now!
responded to my own online dating ad. Do you think I know I'm not a cute bisexual chick with DD-boobs?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
that leaves just me!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Now what do I do with all those results?
Just be sure not to google google, or you will break the internet.
Loose lips lose spit.
will it make em come?
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
[Xander reviews a high-school student's records.]
Willow: Have you Googled her yet?
Xander: Willow! She's seventeen!
Willow: It's a search engine.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I wonder how many found some infantile remarks they made in rec.arts.stereo 10 or 20 years ago (or some other site notorious for flame-fests)
and cringe when they read the stuff they wrote then? Or how many liberals turned conservative, or had some other big change in attitude?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
And how exactly do they know which people googled themselves and which people googled others? I think there's just a little dollop of bullshit in this one. 76.288% of statistics are made up on the fly.
Google returns almost zero hits about me.
I have a last name that is a very rare last name but a very common English proper noun, specifically a title.
I also have a first name that became popular in the 1980s.
So any Google search will bring up literally thousands of hits to unrelated people all over the English speaking world.
A quotation search "[first name] [last name]" reveals that Google ignores punctuation within quotes, and returns 46 hits, of which 7 pertain to me (on pages 3 & 4). Most hits are hits because the documents include a list of names of the format [first name], [title (which is my last name)] [next first name].
A quotation search "[first name] [middle init] [last name]" only gets 1 hit, which is my work. Oddly enough NOT my Google App web page.
I find the low number of hits interesting because professionally I have to be licensed with multiple state & Federal agencies. You would think those would turn up, but no.
Email and pseudonym searches are equally fruitless.
So, if you want to get lost in Google you can either have a common name or an unusual name made out of common words.
I've been a busy guy. I even have my own Wikipedia page!
So that's kinda uncomfortable. For you.
Hairy palms?
Have gnu, will travel.
I hardly show up at all, by design.
I mean, who is going to look for "NotQuiteReal", or any one of a number of identities I might or might not admit to, and associate it with "me"?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I nominate "ungoogleable" to be the best word in this thread, and possibly the entire universe.
/. account name to bury all my past webternet shenanigans under dozens of pages of /. articles, and to make it appear as if Arthur Grumbine was only capable of being Insightful, Interesting, Informative, and Funny.
On a slightly related side-note, I chose to have my real name as my
Of course, if they find this post...then they'll see my true form...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
After millennia of people asking themselves "Who am I?" "What am I doing in this world?" over and over we now have the technology to answer that question.
... but my name is Michael Bolten.
Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.
You are Cory Doctorow. There is only one sci fi author I know of who has worked in IT and been on the net since the late 90's. And that's you! :-)
expandfairuse.org
Luckily, the only actual reference to me is from my old secondary school's website, and is something to do with my GCSE results.
Off topic? Seriously?
Here's a topic: There is a sense-of-humor deficit out there. On another thread (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=374665&cid=21521813) I posted a comment about how LinkedIn is a MySpace for resume polishers and I actually get a response how that's not completely accurate. At least that comment got modded up. And now this "off topic" thing?
I wrote parts of this stuff
People stopped asking others stupid questions and instead opened Google themselves. Like that's ever going to happen.
It's kinda fascinating really. I use just to see how waves of the internet ocean bob up and down with hits. Too it's a really fun to watch how all the comments I leave everywhere take on lives of their own and start popping up on servers all over the world.