Is it weird to google someone elses name?

[Azalee]

Facebook shows up, and oddly enough, a little blurb from when I had a solo infront of the school board with my choir group in 7th grade lol. Most people spell my name incorrectly, and not many share the same spelling of my first name. My last name is also sort of obscure.

I have googled an ex to find his flickr account and deviantart page.

[FNH]

I have the same last name as your avatar.

rodriguez?

[Mizango]

Lou Dobbs incoming...

[Dimmauk]

rodriguez?

Si

[Kajii]

I've done it a few times at work out of boredom. Totally cool brah.

[ferigor]

Anything on the internet is considered public domain, and fair game by my standards. I wouldn't feel bad if I looked up someone's phone number in the phonebook, or read about them in the newspaper, I'm not going to feel bad if I find something about them on the internet.

At first, I had a little bit of an issue with this, as it does seem like a trust issue (with friends, I whole heartedly think businesses should do it and when I start looking for a better job I'm going to change my profiles to private) but sometimes you need to get information about someone, let me tell you my story.
Awhile ago, I started dating this crazy girl. Now, I know, all women are crazy, but she was really crazy. One night we're talking and it comes up that she raped another girl in high school (well, her and 2 friends so it was a gang rape if you want to be technical). She didn't really want to talk about it. The story that she gave me, was this one friend of her's had the hots for her, and one night she "made the girl's dreams come true" and then the girl cried foul and called the cops. Seemed like a pretty likely story, so I didn't push the issue, and she didn't want to talk about it because it really screwed up the rest of her high school blah blah blah.
As things got more serious, I got more curious (unintentional rhyme, I promise). One day we were at my house and she Yahooed her name. Her roommate did it and found this article she had written about legalizing marijuana and she couldn't find it. I explained to her that yahoo is pretty sub-par compared to google so we went and googled her name. We found the article she wrote, and another article that refered to her raping that other girl that was on a Hate crimes website. There was all sorts of Aryan Nations stuff and the like on there and she wanted to see if she could get it removed. I explained to her that since it was from the newspaper, she couldn't really do anything (the website also looked like it hadn't been updated in awhile, so I don't think anyone was still running it).
After she went home, I went back to the hate crime website because it linked to an article about her from her home town newspaper. Unfortunately, the article was old so they didn't still have it on the website, but I could buy it from their archive. I debated it for a couple days and I decided I just had to know, so I shelled out $5.00 to see what I could find out.
As it turns out, her and her 3 friends were hanging out playing basketball. They went over to one of the girl boyfriend's house and started watching porno. "The Victim" (there's more to the story then what I'm going to post, not going to go into it that much) decided she didn't want to watch porn, so she went to lay down in one of the bedrooms. The other girls came in, 2 of them held her down, and the girl I was dating banged her with a plastic bottle until she bled and then wrote on her with a marker. The article didn't really go into anymore depth, and like I said the girl didn't want to talk about it.
She didn't do any prison time, and she wasn't a registered sex offender, so she got off free and clear, but it was still one of those things that give you an uneasy feeling. After that, I decided that I had no qualms with researching shit like this. I found out about this after we'd been dating awhile, and she is a much different person now than she was then, but had I known about this earlier, I wouldn't have pursued our relationship as much as I did (I have a 5 year old daughter and a psychopath baby's mama to think about after all).

Nothing came up on pipl that was too extraordinary. Apparently I'm also a really good high school baseball player right now though. Everything else was just social networking sites and the white pages.

Edit: Tried to find her on pipl and the only thing that came up was her facebook.

[Feielle]

I like having a very unique name... I'm fairly certain I'm the only person on the planet with my name (and no, it isn't something extremely foreign sounding or a mishmash of consonants without vowels) but that does lend itself to some VERY easy google-ing.

Once, during an office meeting about extending our company profile online, we decided to google people's names and see what came up. This was on a plasma screen in the middle of our conference room with my entire company (small company, about 20 people) looking on. Someone said they expected my Facebook page to be the first thing to come up...

Nope, it ended up being articles written on my Cosplay props. Dorky, but everyone here knows I'm a dork, so no big loss.

Sucks for people with unique names and incriminating online profiles though.

[Metah]

The only other person in this world with the same name as me is my cousin. lol.

[Jefe]

No, in fact whenever we get interviewees at work, I'll google their name to see what comes up.

googling ppl's screennames works too

Tis why I never use my RL infos anywhere and use different forum names. This is the only place where my PSN listed... prolly used it in GF ;x

[Tythera]

Did a pipl search and it found only whitepages and my ex's livejournal I haven't spoken to in 9 years. She did one of those stupid viral questionnaire things and I got mentioned in one. Her answer is still less than inspiring:

"First love:* devon, hahahahaha.... oh god."

Apparently a 15 year old version of me just doesn't measure up

[Ziero]

I just tried it and found nothing about myself or even my actual name, but 15 pages worth of people who have a slight varient of my name.

I dunno if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

[Zhais]

Try pipl.com
You get interesting results.

oh man oh man oh man

I thank you very much for posting this. Due to this search engine, I found a LJ entry by one of my friends' friends doing hilarious commentary on a school interview I had done on me :D

[Moosey]

I do it pretty often, mostly with people's screen names. You'd be surprised how easy it is to find/find info on people on the internets.

Most people don't know how to hide on the internet.

[Mizango]

Most people don't know how to hide on the internet.

I cant stress that enough how true that is. If you peruse porn and other things, do not for the love of god use your work email address or domain name.

We had someone get fired for using their default mail address on Beastiality sites along with their real name, age and occupation. They decided to leave the company name out of it in an attempt to be "discrete".

Many lulz continue to be had.

[SephYuyX]

It is wierd, I mean really it's essentially the new way to stalk someone, but instead of going down to the town hall or police station to dig up info, you just google the name. But oh well, I do it.

[Xiona]

I used that pipl site and found a listing of an address i used to live at in albany. had my phone number and everything except one thing... it lists me as being 76 haha

[Ragnell]

I cant believe how stupid people is when it comes to porn and work

[Mizango]

I cant believe how stupid people is when it comes to porn and work

Yeah man, it's mind numbing. If you really think your job, school, friends etc... aren't seeing what you are doing in the virtual world you are living under a rock.

Then again, it takes someone to know what they are doing. Like I mentioned earlier I was a white dude named Daniel for a brief time thanks to someone fucking sucking at Google. Either way you have to be careful, I mean if you have nothing to hide then no worries.

[Olo401]

ack.. that pipl thing is freaky. I just found my ex-fiancee.

brb posting in FoD

Edit: I personally don't come up (and i like it that way), but as expected I got both a Family Guy character and his creator.

[SephYuyX]

No record of my existence on that site :3 Google doesnt find me either.