Don’t Just Stand There--Google
About two months ago a friend set me up on a blind date. We met for lunch. He was sweet, provocative, charming, self-effacing, brainy and adventurous. He had no overt hang-ups, tics or crippling complexes, and he had a fine, thick head of hair, which is something to take into account when you’re still single in your 30s. In short, he seemed like a great guy.
He told me he was a “screenwriter.” Well, no self-respecting woman in this town believes that one. Out of deference to his feelings, I didn’t even ask if I’d recognize any of his projects.
Reader, I Googled him.
I typed his name into my computer and cast my virtual net into cyberspace. I used the hottest search engine around to dredge through a billion Web pages in less than a second. I almost fell off my Aeron chair when I found that he was . . . actually successful. My detective instincts are nothing unusual for a girl on the prowl in big-city America. You never know if a hot guy who buys you an apple martini in a hip L.A. bar will turn out to be an unemployed bisexual vacuum cleaner salesman with two ex-wives, six children and a rap sheet out to here. Googling is a tool that every savvy single should have in her repertoire.
“I always Google before dates. It is a must,” said a 24-year-old researcher at a high-tech magazine in San Francisco, who asked not to be named for fear that someone would Google her. “One time I Googled (actually Nexised and Googled--I’m in research) and found out that my blind date had done the same for me . . . .” They did not go out again. Turned out that Googling each other was about the only thing they had in common.
When Bonnie Powell, 29, an Oakland journalist, met her photographer boyfriend at work two years ago, she didn’t know much about him. So before they went out, she Googled him. She stumbled on a lengthy magazine profile that mentioned his astrological sign. “I amazed him on our first date by saying, ‘You are a Pisces,’ ” she said. “He said, ‘How do you know?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, you just seem like one.’ ” He was blown away. She didn’t tell him she’d Googled him until two years later. They are still together.
So what is a Google?
Any mathematician--or schoolchild--knows that a googol is a one followed by 100 zeros. Sergey Brin, president and co-founder of Google Inc., was a math major and chose the name because it is a metaphor for the vast reach of the search engine. Cindy McCaffrey, vice president of corporate communications for the Mountain View-based company, said there is no way to track how many people use the Google search engine to conduct anonymous Internet sleuthing, but judging by letters and anecdotes, she said, lots of it is going on.
“People have been Googling each other for a long time,” McCaffrey said. “But it has just come into its own as a verb.”
My anecdotal research would indicate that the profile of a typical dating Googler is this: female, single, under 30, in the computer or research business.
Speaking generally, girls Google guys, and guys Google themselves. (That, said McCaffrey, is a “vanity search.”) Men said they don’t tend to Google, because if a woman is a babe, no bad data in the world could forestall a date.
“Google is my search engine of choice,” said Michael Edland, 41, a Los Angeles computer expert. “But I think if you talk to women rather than men, there are more Googlers. They are more likely to think, ‘Is he a serial killer?’ If guys do it, I think the only thing they might be thinking is, ‘Maybe she’s an ex-stripper.’ And that might be a good thing.”
Women, by contrast, want to weed out losers, and give themselves a sense of control.
A 20-something online wedding writer from Manhattan put it this way: “Guys don’t really care that much. They don’t really want to know your story. They are more interested in the next date, physical contact.”
She said the personal information that litters the Internet can be so random that you have to be a little romantic, and a little boy crazy, to derive much satisfaction out of most Google background searches.
“It appeals to a certain personality,” she said. “I need to know what is coming next at all times. I need some semblance of control over my emotional life. Some people like to let life happen naturally. I’m not that way.” Most of her searches, she said, don’t yield anything too juicy, “But every once in a while you get a home page, and that is like, ‘Jackpot!’ ”
In rare cases, with a hometown or alma mater to narrow down the field, a Google can reveal whether a guy is misrepresenting himself or even lying like a dog.
“I actually met someone this summer who was in college, who told me he was 21,” said the compulsive Manhattan Googler. “I had just turned 25, so there was an age difference, but no big thing. We went on a few dates and then I thought, OK, it’s time to Google.”
It turned out her summer fling was two years younger than he had claimed. The wedding writer said she was so mortified she flushed red down to the roots of her hair right there in front of her computer. “Google was delivering the goods,” she said, “but emotionally it packs a punch.”
Of course, Googling has its pitfalls. Sometimes your hits could be for someone else with the same name, which can lead to awkward situations. And sometimes you give yourself away over dinner, which can seem sinister.
And sometimes dragging a net through cyberspace just doesn’t pull much up. People who have common names can get lost in the crowd, people with unusual names can be completely exposed.
This turned out to the case for the San Francisco magazine researcher who Googled her blind date.
“Unfortunately, he has this totally generic Irish name, so almost nothing came up,” she said. “The first thing was a guy who is a spokesman for easy squirt green ketchup, or something like that,” she recalled.
Panicked, she said she ran to the friend who set her up to see what she had gotten herself into. Her friend allayed her fears: The squirting ketchup spokesman and her blind date were not the same man.
Googling, to be sure, is only one of myriad tools for background searches on the Internet. Those with corporate accounts said they will frequently use Lexis-Nexis, an online data base available only to paid subscribers, to find out if their dates have criminal records, ex-wives, nice houses or big mortgage payments.
Googling is also dangerously contagious. Once you go public with your Google, the practice can spread like a virus, and in severe cases even lead to Googleplexes (fear of being Googled). Extremely moral people who claim they never would have thought of engaging in such furtive Internet snooping suddenly have to dismount their high horses. It’s open warfare; they counter-Google. And worse.
Back to me.
My unassuming 30-something blind date turned out to be a highly pedigreed Easterner with multiple movie credits. He had sold single scripts for more money than I . . . well, for a lot.
Armed with my new information, I felt empowered. I couldn’t wait until our next date, so I could lead the conversation hither and yon, and play him like a fine Spanish guitar. I took notes on some of his more notable B-movie plots, thinking perhaps I could weave them seamlessly into our dinner banter and throw him ever so slightly, ever so delectably, off balance.
Perhaps I’d throw out a cryptic allusion over appetizers, and deliver a conversation-stopping zinger over dessert. The prospect was exhilarating.
In the end, though, I fessed up.
“That’s scary,” he said, when I told him what I’d done.
Two dates later, after he delivered some amazing insights and uncanny observations about my old boyfriend in a tone of uncharacteristic authority, he admitted he had looked up my old boyfriend online.
Only he got the wrong guy.
Now that’s scary.
