Googling

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the importance of googling well. Some of the more interesting points of the article were: 80% of recruiters said that they used search engines to find more information about candidates for employment. 40% of individuals use search engines to look up friends and acquaintances that they’ve lost touch with. Since having a high position on a search engine has become important for careers, prospective parents think about search engine placement when naming their child.

The article got me to thinking that this is something that I’ve never discussed with my students when working on websites, blogs, wikis and podcasts. I did think about search engine placement when I created my first domain, cyberbali.com. When doing a search using the key word Bali on Google, I gave up trying to find cyberbali after looking at 200 results. Obviously cyberbali is fairly far down the list. However, when I did a search for my site Sumbawa.org using the keyword Sumbawa, my website came up ranked #2 both on Google and Yahoo. So one site seems well placed on the main search engine. What about my name? When I googled my name, I came up with an email to a forum written 11 years ago. This is a good lesson for our students about what kinds of tracks a person leaves when they use the internet. Despite this interesting find, there were a lot of articles that I have written on the internet that didn’t appear. But, if someone was looking for me, it would be easy to find me.

Next I checked on my site stats over at cyberbali. The most popular page was the employment page, followed by the papua page, the home page, and then Sumbawa. Some surprises were Islam and Pakistan in the top 20.

So what are some more lessons that I can draw from this little exercise other than be thoughtful when you create a domain name, and think before you publish on the internet, you can never tell when something you wrote may come back to haunt you.