Continuing in my series of responses to blogs and columns on the Poynter Institute’s web site I am looking today at how Google effectively exposes inaccuracies in news and life. You might start by reading this Poynter Column.
The situation is this: someone posts information that may or may not be true online, it get’s picked up and indexed by Google, eventually both parties have moved on and the information is no longer valid or true for whatever reason… Well this becomes a problem when we factor in how many people world-wide Google names to dig up information about people.
The today hook here is that while students and professionals are looking for new jobs, their future potential employers are Googling the applicants to see what kind of online identity they have. So you should see now how this innacurate or misleading information can not be physically and mentally disturbing and troublesome for the person whom the information posted is about.
Now I keep tabs on my online identity whenever I can but there have been times when something old or not very useful for whatever reason has ranked above my current information in Google. For the average Internet user, manipulating Google’s search results would not be such an easy thing to do, however with about 10 minutes of work and about a 3 days of waiting, I effectively was able to push that old information down and out of the index.
Was this the right thing to do? I’m not completely sure, but at the time I considered it a fairly successful PR campaign. Not that the other information was inaccurate or had anything wrong with it, it was just from the early days of my online exploits and doesn’t really deserve if you will to be still floating around.
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