When Google Results Don't Count
from the you-ain't-nothing-if-you-ain't-on-google dept
I guess it’s a sign of the times, but a columnist at ZDNet tried to research the FBI’s new CIO and decided that he couldn’t be good after there weren’t many Google hits for him. The columnist later interviewed the guy and realized that he actually was much more qualified, but not very public on the web. Certainly, Google is a very useful research tool for many things – but when people start relying on it to see how important someone is, or how qualified someone is for a job, it seems like they’re relying a little too much on the technology.
Comments on “When Google Results Don't Count”
Most people don't have information online.
For people like me, there is no doubt that using a web search engine will reveal more than 50 references to me under my pseudoname and real name…but I’ve noticed that people like me tend to be a very small group compared to the rest of the world which doesn’t have anything returned about them on a web search…
I saw this first hand when I received my 10 year anniversary letter with the list of “missing” students (of which 99.9% of my better friends in high school where on the list…) Doing a search on each friend I had in high school, I found that of the 15-20 names I considered my closest friends in high school on the various search engines, I only found one reference that pertained to one of my friends…and this was actually a reference to his father, a noted scientist in Japan…
Seems like most people don’t have anything online about themselves…and even though I find this hard to say, “most people don’t care to have anything online about themselves…”