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People Were More Likely To Google Themselves This Year

Posted by Zonk on Fri Dec 21, 2007 06:30 PM
from the keeping-up-with-the-joneses dept.
The Internet Businesses Google Privacy
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)."
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Submission: Googling Yourself More in 2007? by pickens (49171)
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  • i wonder (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xubu_caapn (1086401) on Friday December 21 2007, @06:33PM (#21786118)
    how many knew enough to put it in quotations?

  • for this community (slashdot) (Score:5, Funny)

    by skydude_20 (307538) on Friday December 21 2007, @06:35PM (#21786136) Journal
    people were always more likely to ___________ themselves this year

  • google themselves? (Score:5, Funny)

    by farkus888 (1103903) on Friday December 21 2007, @06:38PM (#21786168)
    I've been googling myself at a pretty steady frequency since about the time I turned 13!
  • 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.
    • 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...
    • If you only associate positive things with your name, it can help when potential employers do a cursory check on you.
      • The only thing that comes up several times about me after googling myself is a potential threath to Windows Vista security I once described. It was published as a footnote in a single article, and it comes now up in english, french, spanish, italian and german. So what impression will a potential employer have about me?
      • Man, how many of us used our real names when talking about all kinds of crazy shit back in the day... I did, and regret it to this day. Especially on usenet. OH man hehe. On the web my real name is only good stuff, published articles, interviews, technical stuff from listservs, etc. On usenet? Holy fuck. Flame wars, drugs, sex, all kinds of really embarrassing stuff.
         

        • On the web my real name is only good stuff, published articles, interviews, technical stuff from listservs, etc. On usenet?


          Usenet is, as I recall, "google-able" through Google Groups, back pretty far into what is, in internet time, the ancient history.
          • That was my point. Who would have thunk it, posting to usenet 20 years ago, that it would all still be here, searchable by anybody. Google says they will delete posts for you but I have tried, they always deny the request for some odd reason. Oh well, the next time around, when the new fangled interuse web thingy comes around, I'll remember not to use my real name.

        • Re:You may google my user name, not my given name (Score:5, Interesting)

          by localman (111171) on Friday December 21 2007, @08:00PM (#21786848) Homepage
          Man. I get that the reality is people are super judgemental and that we're always playing the reputation game whether we like it or not... but it does bum me out that people have to be so fake all the time. People haven't come to accept that others are sometimes as wild and crazy as we are. Everyone has skeletons in the closet, so why is everyone so shocked when they find other people's skeletons in the closet? Meh.

          I suppose I'm an idiot: I wear my freakdom like a badge of honor most of the time. Anyone could find out pretty easily that I was part of a white rap group, an offensive punk band, and that I directed a film that features Jesus smoking a joint. So far it hasn't been a problem, and I've had some good jobs. But I bet it will bite me eventually. Oh well... I'm going to try to represent: you can be wild and crazy at times and still be extremely diplomatic and professional when called for.

          I hope someday we can deal with people being multi-faceted.

          Cheers.
          • Back in the day I was all about just being who I was (am). I wasn't ashamed of it (still not) and as you said, proudly wore my freakishness on my sleeve. A lot of us were like that, the old days on usenet were the wild west. You had scientists posting under their real names how to purify heroin for gods sake hehe. Talking about bizarre sex fetishi, discussing all manner of weirdo crap. University professors, research scientists, government workers, military types, etc. etc. It was just discussion groups, it

    • Re:You may google my user name, not my given name (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Thunderstruck (210399) on Friday December 21 2007, @07:03PM (#21786430)
      Like anything else, the benefits will vary depending on who you are. You indicate that you have a successful life in the IT industry. You probably work for a school or business, and have no need for people to be able to find you on the Internet.

      By contrast, small businessmen, artists, private doctors, lawyers, politicians, and a host of other types of people not only benefit from being visible on the internet, they need to be there in order to seem legitimate to potential clients or customers.

      My guess is, in the future, how we think about the face we present on the internet will be a lot like how we think about getting dressed in the morning. We'll ask ourselves, "Where am I going, and is anyone important going to see me there?"

    • The benefits are only subtly apparent and difficult to measure at best. It helps if your father has the same name! Since I joined the online community with CompuServe when it was partially owned by New York Telephone, I was always aware of the power of computers. It occurred to me that I could be indexed involuntarily permanently, and so I began using the suffix Jr. to distinguish myself from my father. It still ticks him off that I have WAY more results than he does courtesy of an OLD web page [geocities.com] and the nume
    • Why bother? I pretty much always use my name in stuff. I got my current job precisely because I was visible... at its peak the first 6 pages of any google search came up with stuff about me. Now it's buried in other Tony Hoyle's any I'm only a footnote (partly due to changes in google indexing, partly because I'm not posting on things like LKML any more so don't get the high profile hits).

      Of course if there's someone else with your name who's a serial drug user, criminal, paedophile etc. and your prospe

    • Am I the only person who has actively concealed themselves from prying online eyes?

      I just hide behind the more famous people a Google search will pull up. I'm safe for quite some time...

      ---John Holmes...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by spasm (79260)
      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
    • I haven't needed to actively conceal myself. If you Google my real name, you'll get plenty of hits, but I am neither the baseball player, nor the musician, nor the author. Two of the top 100 Google hits for my name are me, but good luck picking them out.

  • I'm not who I say I am (Score:4, Funny)

    by maggiemerc (950581) on Friday December 21 2007, @06:46PM (#21786258)
    Apparently I'm not a writer but a prolific techno god in Russia. This is exciting news.
      • I share the name of an apparently prolific college football player. He dominates the first several pages of Google, with only a review I posted on Amazon being both me and first page.
      • I seem to be several other people including a graphics designer, and, for a while, an editor of a major newspaper. There was a time that I was also a respected actor in adult films with an all-male cast, but as far as I can tell, I don't seem to be doing that any more. I can say this safely, because there are enough graphics designers out there that figuring out which one is my clone is next to impossible.

  • Third party (Score:4, Funny)

    by davidc (91400) <davidc@ccmi.sal[ ]du ['k.e' in gap]> on Friday December 21 2007, @06:49PM (#21786276)
    I much prefer having other people google me. So much more satisfying.

  • Ummmm (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SlashDev (627697)
    How do they know that people are googling themselves??????
  • 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 [google.com] and Google Images [google.com]. 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 [cliveholloway.net] though, feel free to help build that little googlebomb ;-)

  • 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...

  • Something people don't talk about! (Score:3, Funny)

    by digitalderbs (718388) on Friday December 21 2007, @07:04PM (#21786438)
    I happen to "google" myself in the shower every morning, but it's not exactly newsworthy.
  • With all those viruses hanging around. GTD Googly Transmitted Disease

  • Spread the word: (Score:4, Funny)

    by LM741N (258038) on Friday December 21 2007, @07:20PM (#21786580)
    Self Googling will make you blind.

  • I suppose (Score:3, Funny)

    by UnknowingFool (672806) on Friday December 21 2007, @07:26PM (#21786624)
    Cmdr Taco googling himself would come up with 5 million references to "Lame". :P
  • [Ben Stein Voice]That sounds diiiiirty[/Ben Stein Voice]

  • Trademark Joke (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel (80510) on Friday December 21 2007, @08:30PM (#21787010)
    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.
    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > Absolutely nothing comes up on Google when I search myself.

        Congratulations! It looks like you are not notable.

        > If it might be potentially embarrassing to you in the future, don't put it on the internet.

        Believe it or not, some people are subject to scrutiny by others. These people, that we sometimes term "successful" or "interesting", are sometimes commented on by others.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hedwards (940851)
        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 im

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Torvaun (1040898)
          Sometimes people are logged in to their iGoogle homepage. Then they search for a name that just so happens to match the one on their account. Google, being ever-so-crafty, figures out that they must be Googling themselves.

    • Re:Google? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by proudfoot (1096177) on Friday December 21 2007, @07:09PM (#21786484)
      So I have. So, how many people googled themselves after reading this post?

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