Don't tell the Google!

[green_amber]

.. said Ish last night, horrified at finding that we could find her degree, place of work and work telephone number from Google, when she thought she had no online presence of any kind..

SO..


[Poll #694457]

Comments

[sara-lou.livejournal.com]

I've only ever googled a few people I found interesting; I'm not a mad stalker or anything like that. One was a complete drunk in the pub who was insisting he was a famous fashion designer... so I googled him to see if it was bull, and lo and behold, he was... and even opened London Fashion Week this year. Might get him to make my wedding dress if I can extract a drunken promise...

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

One of the scarier coincidences online is that if you google me, one of the pictures it finds is you. Blame that man steer, I guess ;)

[sara-lou.livejournal.com]

A work colleague found that picture of me (if it's the one I'm thinking of, green top?) while doing a google image search. I hate to think what he was searching on... but searching for you, gets me? Dear God, how on earth? ;-)

[sara-lou.livejournal.com]

Argh, so it does! LOL!

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

I think it's a mix of Steer's old photos page and Google's dodgy way of associating text with pictures. (The algorithm is poor - as far as I can tell it tries to associate pictures that don't have ALT tags with text they're 'near', and doesn't always work well).

[dalmeny]

The people I meet in a professional capacity are either academic/scientist people who I'd expect to have an online presence or local gov/consultant types who are unlikely to be found online at all. I'd only bother to google the former, most of the time.

Outside work, the people I'm most likely to google are those who send me feedback on my fanfic. This is because I have a very bad memory for names. I often used to respond with "Thank you very much for taking the time to write to me about my work," when I should have written, "I adored your short stories X, Y and Z and am humbled that you have chosen to send me a few kind words about my meagre efforts."

[easterbunny.livejournal.com]

I'm most likely to google someone if I want their professional contact details without the hassle of navigating through a company or department website. There's one company I deal with that has a policy of never printing contact details for employees online (probably for good reason for some of their departments), but this is really aggravating when I'm trying to phone or mail something to a person who also doesn't include contact details in their sig file.

[andrewducker]

I wouldn't google someone "as soon as possible" - but if I got to know someone, and they were interesting, etc. then I'd get around to it eventually.

I googled my counsellor...

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I googled a prescribing shrink once, found out that he's a drummer. Soon after that, he expressed a dislike for Richard Thompson. It did not turn out well.

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

A lot of the people I work with (software engineers) have no visible online presence. My own web presence is minimal, but I use my real name on USENET and there's contact information for the domains I own.

I don't deliberately avoid being conspicuous online, neither do I deliberately attempt to be conspicuous.

I know steer thinks anyone who courts privacy is sinister ;P

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

A thought - I wonder if there are generational/age issues here? - most of my colleagues are late 30s to mid 40s, and most of us only encountered the Net in our very late teens or early 20s. Are younger people who've grown up with the Internet more likely to assume 'everyone is there'?

[kriste]

heh - early thirties too! t'internet was now invented a Very Long Time Ago.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

It did remind me to reGoogle me. I am a combo of some New Zealand journalist, some nurse in Wales, and me. I guess people would figure out that I do reenactment and am paganish from a Google, but then I'm not sure I'd want to work somewhere where I was excluded from for those tendencies, IYSWIM.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Could be worse. I get an evangelical US singer, Nottingham's chief constable and the cretin who heads Christian Voice.

[greengolux.livejournal.com]

For the first one I ticked 'I might do it if I was really interested in them but very rarely' and 'I'd only do it if I met them online eg on LJ' but they're not a perfect fit for my answer. It's more like 'I might do it if it happened to occur to me and I thought it might throw up interesting results, but that's only happened very rarely' and 'I'd only do it if I had some indication that they were comfortable with having a public web presence that is obviously googlable eg. having a public livejournal with their name attached'. And in both cases having just met someone doesn't make me any more or less likely to google for them - I've googled for a variety of people in the past, one or two I'd known a couple of months, some longer than that and who I was still in contact with, some even longer than that and who I'd lost touch with. I've never googled someone immediately upon meeting them.

I've also never googled anyone I know in a professional capacity, and am not likely to, so I had to tick 'other' in the last question.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

First four links are about an American actor who died before I was born, and the fifth one is me, claiming not to be him.

[ophelia-complex.livejournal.com]

Other: Depends on how common their name is. After wading through several google pages of a common name, I get bored before I reach anything interesting.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Civil servants are rarely found on Google in a professional capacity, and when they are it's normally appearing in minutes of meetings. People seem to turn me up on Google all the time -- most often while looking for something quite different.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I've said 'be suspicious' since I'm assuming that a professional contact would be someone working in my field, and it would be ... odd ... if someone in my area didn't have at least some web presence. Although things have changed - time was when the people I knew at a University would basically account for about 80% of their University's website. Nowadays it's a right bugger trying to find basic contact details.

Actually, writing this I realise that I'm mostly dealing with other professions at the moment as part of a building project - architects, engineers and builders - none of whom have substantial web presence except their corporate sites.

I generally don't search for people I meet socially - mostly because it doesn't seem worth the bother. Unless it's someone who really sparks my interest in them in a big way. I turn up the search juice to maximum near-stalking level on the rare occasions I meet someone IRL for the first time when I've only met them online, unless someone I know and trust IRL knows them reasonably well, or we're meeting as part of some larger general gathering.

I wouldn't generally regard it as suspicious that someone I met didn't show up online, unless they had claimed a background that ought to show up.

[zeit.livejournal.com]

These days I just assume that I will be Googled and so keep my profile relatively low. When I'm looking for work I don't want to worry about what a potential employer might find objectionable.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Okay, how much is it worth for me not to start posting claims that you were run out of North Yorkshire for writing obscene odes to the local sheep?

No Google?

[libertango.livejournal.com]

I would neither be suspicious nor surprised -- clueless people do exist, after all. But that's just it: I'd flag them as "clueless", and treat them provisionally as such until they demonstrated otherwise.

In fact, these days, I can't think of a field where I'd regard an internet presence -- any field, any internet presence -- as less professional than the lack of one. Quite the contrary. Engagement in the world is always to be preferred, imho.

Re: No Google?

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

This is the nearest to my view - this came out of trying to persuade I last night that it was more professional to be Googleable than not.

[vin_petrol]

I'm generally just "too rubbish" to remember to get around to googling most people I meet. Generally, the only exceptions are curvy goth women. I do sometimes google for them in the hope of finding a selection of "here's me in my new corset - what do you think?" pictures :-)

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

Having just googled myself, I see that the top hits remain -- as they have for many years -- an ancient list of the various reviews I wrote for BSFA publications around 20-25 years ago. You have to go forward a couple of pages to get hits on my association with GUFF -- and then lots more pages before coming across any professional references. Which is is strange: I'd have thought that the frequency with which I'm named as the contact for our regulatory consultations would have long since ousted the BSFA list from the top spot.

[numbat.livejournal.com]

I never meet anybody new and interesting and of the new people I do meet I don't normally learn their surnames.

[alanro.livejournal.com]

Well, I definitely googled my new boss, especially considering that the only reason he got the job is that he is a close and personal friend of my grandboss...

[palatinate.livejournal.com]

Somewhere between "as soon as possible" and "maybe but very rarely". I'll generally make the effort if I think it's likely to be worth it - e.g. are they the sort of person who may have a homepage, LJ etc. But I don't do it just to see what I can dig up.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

It depends on context, doesn't it? Who are they, how did we meet? How much spare time do I have on my hands at the moment? Can I remember what it was I was trying to get done online? (That would be using Google to kill time until said task reoccurs to me.)

[suaveswede.livejournal.com]

This made me google myself for the first time

Googled

[suaveswede.livejournal.com]

Of the top ten mentions of me on Google 7 are really about ME. I have also been cruly reminded that i have googled myself before. Last time there was a way better pic of me.