Sunday, October 12, 2008

The Google You

Google is in fact the biggest search database known to internet history. Its amazing to see how much information it contains and searches by just a single keyword. I'm sure that everyone has Googled themselves at some point and probably not found anything. However, corporations and businesses are now Googling prospective employees and making sure there isn't any dirt on their potentials and making sure that they have clean internet faces. I recently mentioned this to my roommate and she asked me if I had Googled myself and I said yes. Thankfully, the only thing that can be seen after searching my name is my Facebook profile, but because I have privacy settings on it the only thing that can be seen is my profile picture. She then asked me to Google her name to see what came out and we definitely got so many hits of her name and every single person we found was not her. To her surprise, we found another girl with the same name that also lives in Austin but looked nothing like her. She was a little terrified to know that if businesses were actually doing this, they would never find her and that could possibly cost her a job opportunity. So is this a good thing or a bad thing? There obviously isn't anything bad about her on the internet but then how can people find out if thats the real her or not.

1 comment:

davalos said...

It is incredibly intimidating to know that my potential employers could have view information about me on the internet. What made it more intimidating was finding that there is others with my same name that could possibly get mistaken for me? I just hope personal interviews can clear up that mess! :)