Go Google Yourself

Go Google Yourself

Ever wonder what information people can find out about you within one minute? Assuming they have Internet access, they could search the World Wide Web for you. Here's how.

They could google you. Google is both a noun and a verb. Google.com is the World Wide Web's most popular search engine. While Google is the company name, "google" is also a verb. Dictionary.com tells us the definition of google is: "to search for information about a specific person through the Google search engine." An example would be: "she googled her high school classmates."

Let's google the author. At the google.com web site, I googled myself (with my three names surrounded by quotes) on May 28. The first two entries are newsletters I wrote and published on my web site. The fifth entry shows my listing in the El Dorado Hills Chamber directory and the seventh entry shows my very first article that I published, back in 1996.

Sometimes we get different results if we search by someone's first and last names only. Let's google the author this time by his first and last names only. Google reports that: a) someone named "Mark Germanos" is an artist in Chicago and another person named "Mark Germanos" is a computer network consultant near Sacramento. I am not both...I only married an artist. Regardless, you should be aware of your identity on the Internet.

How did this information get into Google? Search engines have web crawlers. A web crawler (also known as a web spider or ant) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. For example, Google's web crawler found my newsletter page and grabbed some of the articles for its database.

Have some more google fun. Google "El Dorado Hills." Google "Village Life." Google yourself.