You can run but you can't hide from Google

NET RESULTS: Chances are, you've been googled. Somewhere, maybe late at night at home, or maybe to the accompaniment of a morning cappuccino on an office PC, someone has typed your name into that oracle of the 21st century, the Google search engine.

Maybe that someone was you, doing a little google-scan on yourself, testing the digital soup out there to see what the king of search engines has to say about you. Whatever the case, your triumphs and failures, inner thoughts and embarrassing secrets, grumpy rants and mournful job history, have been laid out before someone's feasting eyes in glorious pixels.

Yikes.

As a fascinating cover story in this week's Boston Globe magazine (www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0202/coverstoryentire.htm) makes clear, Google - which is looking at setting up its European operation in the Republic - has changed everything.

Time was, you could post a really thoughtless, idiotic, immature comment onto an online discussion list and know this embarrassing proof of the existence of your Inner Dweeb would, thankfully, remain cloaked in the mists of time.

But then came Google, which is so mind-bogglingly good at doing what it does - winkling out every tiny morsel that exists in the Web and internet world, on any subject you type into its waiting oblong search field - that it's impossible to let the world judge you simply by the person you are today.

Google fetches out the person you were five years ago when you posted a rant about your boss on some obscure Net bulletin board. In some countries, it brings forth any reference to you in official documents - if you've done prison time, for example, or defaulted on loans.

It can find that humiliating picture of you on your debs night, after five too many, when your dress had ripped and your flatmate stuck the picture on her website for the amusement of your close friends.

But she took it down a week later, you say? Too bad that Google indexed the Web, and that picture, during that week. If a Web page has once crossed paths with the Googlebots - the automated software programs that regularly create Google's massive visual index of the web - the page is there forever. And ever.

The evidence that attests to how central Google is to most Web users lives is the rapidity with which Google has become a verb - most likely, not only do I google, but you google, we google, they google, everybody googles.

What Google user hasn't googled just for the heck of it? Old friends, past flames, names of politicians, your boss, that pest who sits two desks over - everyone has something that we'd really like to know about them, some humble detail or faux pas or achievement we'd like to read about.

And then there's the prospectives - the guy who just asked you out, the gal you'd like to ask to dinner. Is he a former embezzler? Has she really won the Businesswoman of the Year award twice? Google reveals all, especially to those using internet dating sites, allowing the Google-adept woman to discover that that 35-year old investment banker Gavin with a full head of hair, into cycling and romantic trips to Paris, is actually 55-year-old office clerk Gavin, with a magnificent comb-over.

According to the Globe, "Somewhere along the path toward changing our daily lives, Google changed our concept of time as well. It has helped make our past - or oddly refracted shards of it - present and permanent."

This raises all sorts of issues. Once upon a time, only professional investigators or institutions such as banks could gain access to the kinds of records now scattered across the Web. Google pulls it all up in a matter of seconds.

"It's the collapse of inconvenience," Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University, told the Globe. "It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realise it."

Many people would argue that if you've done something or said something which has gone on the record at any point, it has become a matter of the permanent public record anyway. Still, who wants to be haunted by something you wrote in 1987? I remember exactly the shock I felt when Google fished out some comment I'd made on an academic discussion list in just that year.

I mean, this was pre-Web, in the clickless days of typing in your communications with a computer through the command line interface.

It's not even that the comments were in any way something I wanted to obliterate. It was just that I was suddenly presented with a slice of my past that I'd utterly forgotten and had no idea had been recorded for posterity. It's meeting the ghost of your Web-surfing past.

That's perhaps the most deeply disconcerting aspect of Google. We led our past lives without ever thinking they could be collated this way in the present, for anyone with a bit of time and an understanding of how to maximise search term results.

Even more disturbing is that the things other people have said about you also come up on Google. Imagine two of your arch-enemies in school passing a note to each other in class. The teacher intercepts it and reads it out before the class - and it's all about you.

That comes pretty close to the mortifying experience of finding others shredding you in the far corners of the Net. It's not that you necessarily mind them having their say - it's just that it is now preserved for all time.

That's given rise to another Google concern - that people will deliberately post nasty things about you that will be forever linked to your name in Google searches. And then there's the little problem of sharing a name with someone who actually is an embezzler or loan defaulter or axe murderer, who ends up being confused with you.

With a name like mine, I don't have to worry about that sort of thing - I doubt there's anyone else with my exact name anywhere in the universe. But the flip side of that positive is that I really can't hide. If it's my name on Google, it definitely refers, for better or worse, to me.

That's why I made absolutely sure my taxes were in order last year. Google made me do it.