Thursday, March 13, 2003
Googling to find people
Okay I admit I often type in someone's name in google to see if i can find out anything about them. I once did this with many of the people I graduated high school with and found only one email address. I emailed her and it was the person I thought it was, pretty funny. Cnn just posted an article where they talk about this googling that goes on with people trying to find other people and when I read this part I had to laugh.
"With more and more personal information flooding the Web daily, only the John Smiths of the world remain relatively immune. Searchers are often foiled by common names. If their long-lost friend is named John Smith, for example, they'd have to wade through 402,000 Google results to find him. To winnow the results, SearchEngineWatch.com's Sullivan suggested including key words like the person's hometown, middle name, or a former job in the search." news link
Exactly. Okay, I am Brian Smith and I do have a rather good web presence by building pages upon pages that reference me and or my activities in such a manner to help bump my name up in google's search results. It has helped. If you just type my name in, you will get a link to my page in the first page of results. That's great, but if you aren't sure you aren't sure. However the point this article makes is perfect, if you combine my name with either where I'm from, where I went to school, where I live now, etc etc etc, chances are I will be the top site returned in that list. Granted, if you've already made it this far, then well I am stating the obvious. I just think it's funny that this article points out exactly what I've known all along. ¶ 3/13/2003 02:12:00 PM
Okay I admit I often type in someone's name in google to see if i can find out anything about them. I once did this with many of the people I graduated high school with and found only one email address. I emailed her and it was the person I thought it was, pretty funny. Cnn just posted an article where they talk about this googling that goes on with people trying to find other people and when I read this part I had to laugh.
"With more and more personal information flooding the Web daily, only the John Smiths of the world remain relatively immune. Searchers are often foiled by common names. If their long-lost friend is named John Smith, for example, they'd have to wade through 402,000 Google results to find him. To winnow the results, SearchEngineWatch.com's Sullivan suggested including key words like the person's hometown, middle name, or a former job in the search." news link
Exactly. Okay, I am Brian Smith and I do have a rather good web presence by building pages upon pages that reference me and or my activities in such a manner to help bump my name up in google's search results. It has helped. If you just type my name in, you will get a link to my page in the first page of results. That's great, but if you aren't sure you aren't sure. However the point this article makes is perfect, if you combine my name with either where I'm from, where I went to school, where I live now, etc etc etc, chances are I will be the top site returned in that list. Granted, if you've already made it this far, then well I am stating the obvious. I just think it's funny that this article points out exactly what I've known all along. ¶ 3/13/2003 02:12:00 PM
