I have always been fascinated by my own Google results. Call it narcissist, but I am concerned about what I am linked to, and who is linked to me (pun totally intended). My results (all 184 of them at this moment) vary from positive, vague, to totally misleading.
My postive results throw up my LinkedIn and Facebook public profiles; articles that appeared in Economic Times, Afaqs, and other publications on me; my own writings as a blogger and commenter in various places, and such.
The vague are vague to most of us, because the link text and original pages are in Chinese, Russian, and Korean ~ reviews (and award listings) of some of my creative work and marketing writings cross these parts.
And the totally misleading, but which I personally wish was true, talks of me sitting on a fat bounty of money – lol!
I must confess, I have worked to keep these results the way I want them to be – including ensuring the lastmentioned result stays around, though not in a high or obvious place
How? It is quite simple, yet complex. And I will leave Julia Angwin to enlighten us on the matter. I spotted this piece of hers this morning on my WSJ Blackberry reader (ahem, name dropping helps too, you see).
Julia Angwin writes candidly how she worked with Google to ensure she looks and stays positive and well linked. I hope she counts this link as a positive one
An excerpt, followed by the original piece by Julia:
“One of the paradoxes of the digital age is that the boundless freedoms of the Internet also constrain our identity. Before the ubiquity of search engines you could go on a date or a job interview and construct a narrative about your life that fit the situation. No one in your book group had to know that you were a punk-rocker in high school. But it’s much harder to package yourself in the Google era. Online, your digital identity often comes down to the top 10 links on your SERP, or search-engine results page.”
Discussion
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