The downside of ego-surfing

Fri 4 May 2007, 07:40 AM

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by Ben Langhinrichs
My 11 year old son was at school yesterday, and the father of another student came in to speak to the class.  He was a scientist, and the kids were enthralled.  Later, after he left, his daughter was proudly talking about how famous her dad was, and went to show my son by searching on Google for her dad's name.  There were 241 hits, which is a quite respectable number, but my son, without thinking too hard, said, "Let's search for my dad".

Let's just say that the number was a whole lot higher, a whole heck of a lot higher.  My son didn't realize the numbers you rack up when you have an on-line blog and people link to it, and then every post of theirs gets linked to it, etc. etc.  He really didn't mean to make this girl feel bad, but it reminded me of the downside of acting like Google says anything about your importance or fame, or anything else.  It is just a search engine, folks.

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