Who’s Googling Who?

Millions have their asses googled daily:

Savvy Web users are using Google.com and other powerful Web search tools to track down or keep tabs on long-lost acquaintances — be they former lovers, classmates, friends or enemies.

These searches, which once might have required hiring a private detective, have become increasingly easy as the amount of data available on the Web grows. Sites like AltaVista.com, which indexed about 20 million Web pages when it was founded in the mid-1990s, now has information on billions of pages.

“If you think of the needle in the haystack analogy, that haystack has gotten a lot larger,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com.

Remaining relevant

Google’s ability to return relevant information has made it the first stop for many searchers checking up on people from their past from a comfortable distance.

“This horrible guy I was dating at work (in New York) turned out to be a stalker and a freak,” said Lynne, a newspaper editor in Washington, D.C., who asked that her last name not be used. “I heard from a friend that he had left New York and moved somewhere else, so I was all freaked out, like, what if he’s following me?

“In paranoia, I Googled him,” she said.

Lynne determined that the man was living in Chicago, after finding a link to a local newspaper there that quoted him in an article.

“The funny thing was his quote, which basically said ‘I don’t like women who are smarter than me,”‘ Lynne said. “So at least I know now why we didn’t hit it off.” [Reters]

I tried a Google search yesterday for old pal Gary Smith, who is now Natalie Merchant’s manager, but the plethora of “Gary Smiths” and the apparent fact that he doesn’t have a business website thwarted me – no contact info yet on Merchant’s site yet either. Oh well.

And speaking of vanity searches, when I first started my Tres Producers blog, it was a rush to see how many links I had received – I found the best way to go about it was to search under “Eric Olsen, blogspot” because we were on blogspot at the time so it was in our URL. This filtered out all of those other “Eric Olsens.” I am proud to say I am the first six “Eric Olsens” that come up on a Google search now – rock on.