Have you been Googled lately?

The days of truly blind dates are over. Now Internet users can google their way through cyberspace to uncover personal details about almost anyone who has surfed the Web.\n"Google," named after the popular search engine, means more than hunting for news, clothes and music online. By entering a name into Google, a person can discover a distant relative, track down a long-lost friend or even dig up dirt on a significant other. \nIn fact, to "google" means "to use an Internet search engine such as Google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend," according to wordspy.com, an online dictionary that relays alternative meanings of words.\nThe growing phenomenon of googling opens a virtual gateway to all sorts of questions about ethics, access and privacy. The practice of someone looking up his or her own name has been termed "ego-surfing," IU information science professor Howard Rosenbaum said.\n"It creates an interesting situation for boundaries of personal and professional lives," he said. Those personal boundaries are crossed, for example, when the contents of a job applicant's personal Web site are viewed by someone the applicant doesn't intend to see it. \nWhen googling unearths personal details, privacy becomes the next question. Besides text from personal Web pages, criminal and driving records, addresses and Social Security numbers are retrievable.\n"It's one of those mixed blessings," Rosenbaum said. "It's certainly good for being able to find a lot of info about yourself or other people. But it can be scary."\nSenior Steve Corenflos, vice president of Residential Information Technology Services, discovered how revealing googling can be. He said he used Google to find a friend he lost contact with. \n"It's an easy way to find out about people or find people you may have lost contact with or want to know more about," he said.\nBut Corenflos said he was surprised to find out from an online newspaper story that his friend had been arrested for trying to buy a fake ID over the Internet. \nGoogling for "Corenflos" turned up about 190 results, while doing the same for sophomore Jon Deck returned more than 100,000 results. How common a name is determines how much information a search will return. \nWhile Corenflos looked for an old pal, Deck has scoured the Web for professors. He accessed a site from the IU home page that lists the salaries of University faculty and staff.\nJunior Nick Cattin googles for his own benefit. He said online search engines prove useful for compiling the contact information of high school students who attend meetings of Young Life, a non-denominational Christian ministry group he leads. He adds the information to a mailing list.\nCattin said he first googled for fun while he was hanging out with friends. \n"Sometimes we just get bored, so we look up people's names, but it's a really good tool because you can look up friends' phone numbers who are not listed on the IU database," Cattin said.\nSo much information is being made available online that the overload is causing problems for search engines and their creators, IU information science professor Kiduk Yang said. \n"It's an information explosion," he said. "Because of the growth and dynamic nature of the Web, data is causing problems. It's very hard to find things because there is so much information."\nWith more than 3 billion Web pages indexed on Google.com and many more behind firewalls, Google maintains the world's largest index of Web pages, according to the search engine's Web site. Google receives more than 150 million queries from around the world each day.\nThe most powerful search engines find about 20 to 60 percent of what exists on the Internet, Rosenbaum said.\nManually categorizing Web pages into an organized system was easier six years ago, when about 350 million web pages existed, Yang said. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to do that.\nYang predicts that "the old way is coming back." The search engine is starting to lose its hook because the number of Web sites is growing. \nIn order to provide the best service, sites such as Google will have to combine searching and classification technology, he said.\nSome businesses wishing to expand their services to the Web consider their listing on Google as important. SearchKing, an Internet company, filed a lawsuit last year against Google, claiming the search engine arbitrarily lowered the company's page ranking, hurting the company's value.\nGoogle's "PageRank" technology computes the rank of a Web site based on how many sites link to it. More "important" pages will be listed higher for the search results. \nUsers ultimately determine a site's popularity.\n"There are really good features to (the Internet), and there are bad features," Rosenbaum said. "It's not a matter of should we have this. It's only going to get more sophisticated and more comprehensive"