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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)."
how many knew enough to put it in quotations?
FYI: I don't know what you guys are talking about half the time.
I have done a few searches on myself, just to see what comes up.
Absolutely nothing comes up on Google when I search myself. I am always amazed how much info people will put on the internet (blogs, facebook and so forth) then be shocked when those college binge drinking from a beer-bong pictures show up somewhere.
My theory: If it might be potentially embarrassing to you in the future, don't put it on the internet. Plain and simple.
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.
Well, if you've been around since the 1990's on the web, and you haven't been forced into a situation where your credentials are your real name I'd assume you're lucky. Almost my entire web presence as an individual is due to School/Work accounts that forced me to use my real name as my credentials and subsequently published them (or had them published via 3rd party sendlists etc.)
My psuedonym has a 30:1 ratio of hits on google to my real name however, and with a modicum of searching I'm sure you could tie the two together...
So I have. So, how many people googled themselves after reading this post?
Exactly, it is considered perfectly legal for potential employers to not hire somebody due to the results of a google.
Personally my name only shows up once for anything that I can identify as being me in the first 6 or so pages of any of the combinations of my first middle and last names. And I like it that way, it used to show up 5 or 6, right now it only shows up once at my alma mater. And I suspect that they'll probably lose that after a while as lab partners from 2003 isn't something that is terribly important 5 years later.
I prefer to be ungoogleable. This way there is very little that anybody would be able to find out about me that I don't know about.
They did a phone survey and just asked people.
If you're an academic, having a bunch of publications come up when someone googles your real name is actually helpful to your career.
Alas, my real name is pretty common (and is shared with a TV character) so you have to add "drugs" or "heroin" after it before I show up on the first page (hey, it's what I study, honest) : P