Have You Googled Yourself Lately?

For a long time, I was a Google hold-out. Maybe it was because I thought their site was boring or I didn’t like the color scheme. Regardless of the reason, I didn’t use them. Then two or three years ago, the internet search business began to change. Companies in the business started to return search results based on what they were being paid, rather than on relevance. The bitter end for my position came when Lycos changed the way that HotBot worked. I was forced into becoming a Googlite.

What I’ve come to realize is that Google’s staying power is driven by three primary factors.
Google is fast – Without any graphics to slow them down (except in Google images), Google returns results quickly.
Search results that are relevant – Paid links on search results pages don’t appear in the same place as the search results themselves.
Technology that is up to date – Google is constantly striving to improve its technology. This drive continues to improve the service.

While all of these things may appear to benefit users of Google, they do have a downside too. As with any tool, Google can be used for good or bad. In Google’s case, the bad side can lead to identity theft and invasions of privacy. For this reason I’ll ask the question again. Have you Googled yourself lately? If the answer is “no”, then you need to.

Identity thieves have found that Google is one of the best tools available to them for seeking out new victims. It allows them to gather information on unsuspecting people without the victim’s knowledge. It has become known as “Google Hacking”.

Google Hacking is used for more than just stealing someone’s identity. Private investigators and police can use is to track down people they are looking for. Criminals can use it to break into websites and steal credit card data, or to disable a website.

The flip side of this is that you can use these same techniques to see if personal information about you is vulnerable. To do this, you need to know a little about how Google actually works.

When you are searching on Google, you probably are used to putting in a word or a phrase and then hitting the enter key. While this may suffice for some searches, it is not the way to get targeted results.

For instance, if you go to Google and search on the term Voter Apathy, you will get more than 70,000 results. If you put quotation marks around the same phrase, you will more than cut the results in half. This is because when you put multiple words in the search box, if both words appear anywhere within a web page, they will be included in the results. The use of quotation marks tells Google to return results with the phrase Voter Apathy, resulting in a more targeted search.

Other tricks can help you target your search even more. By placing a plus sign (+) in front of a word, you can insure that that word will be included in the results. Likewise, if you place a minus sign (-) in front of a word, you can exclude it from the results. So if you want to know about voter apathy, and you want to insure that your results include California but exclude New York, you could type the following into Google’s search box:

“voter apathy” +California “-New York”

Google returns just over 1,800 results. You should note that New York appears in quotes because it is a phrase. Also the minus sign is inside the quotation marks.

Other features of Google allow you to search for specific file types, specific text within a file or text within the title of the file. For specific information, you can click here to download our How2Google Guide.

The reason that all of this is applicable is that you need to know what information is available about you on the internet. Using some of the techniques in this article, and in our guide, I spent about 45 minutes trying to find a list of Social Security Numbers on the Internet. By the time I was done I found a list of around 20 people with their names, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security Numbers. In other words, I had everything I needed to seal their identities. I didn’t have to dig through their trash and I never met or came in contact with any of these people.

While you may find the prospect of someone stealing your identity without your knowledge disturbing. Knowing how to use Google may be one of your best protections. At the very least, you can determine is you hare exposed, and attempt to get your personal data removed from any offending website. So, what should you search.

Start with a simple search; your name. You can’t do this by only conducting a single search however. If your name is Jonathan William Smith, you probably need to conduct the following searches:
“Jonathan William Smith”
“Jonathan W. Smith”
“Jonathan W Smith”
“Jonathan Smith”
“John Smith”
“J. W. Smith”
“J W Smith”

If you get too many results, try adding your city and state. For instance, if you live in Philadelphia but a lot of the results you are getting are for people that live in Las Vegas, you might try the following:
“John Smith” +Philadelphia “-Las Vegas”

Other things that you can search on include:
Your street address – make sure that you put the entire street address in quotes.
Your phone number – when you do this search you should put your area code into the search box followed by a space and then your primary number. For instance, if your phone number is (303) 555-1212, you would use the following search string: 303 555-1212. Do not include parentheses.
Your Social Security Number – When you do this search, make sure you place the number in quotation marks, including the dashes. Otherwise, Google will function as a calculator. In my case, it returns the result -3144. You should also write the number in quotes without dashes, and then in quotes with the period (.) sign replacing the dashes.

If you find personal information about yourself that you want kept secret, contact the website that is displaying the data. Ask them to take the information off their site. You also need to check and see if the data you want kept private has been cached by Google. If it has, you will need to contact Google to have that data removed.

Just remember that knowledge is power. You should Google yourself regularly, to make sure that your private data remains private.

By Jim Malmberg