Google Suggests changing your name, I suggest google is out of touch with tech. | Hacker News Reader

Google Suggests changing your name, I suggest google is out of touch with tech.

adamdomoney.posterous.com

46 pointsCyndre17 comments

Image search? You won't even need to go that far. Just put the person's current name into Google, and let it suggest, "Did you mean [previous name]?"

Should have thought of that one.

And in the future changing your name will result in a "Did you mean [previous name]?" link on google name search's.

Kudos to you

That would only work for rather unique names though.

What was the exact quote please? Including the surrounding conversation...

I find it strange that people keep writing about what he said, without writing what he actually said, including the context...

danah boyd has a great post on this: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/08/16/name-ch...

Summary: "First, it completely contradicts historical legal trajectories where name changes have become increasingly more difficult. Second, it fails to account for the tensions between positive and negative reputation. Third, it would be so exceedingly ineffective as to be just outright absurd."

She provides strong evidence for all of these.

As I see it, Eric's suggestion was indeed quite ridiculous, but the problem itself is not. Your digital past can really backfire or harm your future chances in life.

[Maybe the people screening candidates based on their past need to stop and think about the things they did as a teenager.]

Maybe yes, but what if they will not stop doing such screening? The the problem Eric tried to solve still remains.

Then they might miss some great candidates and be crushed by the company that had better screening. The former will only pick candidates from the pool of full of people with perfect past, the latter from the pool of people with "acceptable" pasts (i.e. minor offences ok, major ones like murder not ok).

The solution to image search is plastic surgery, of course.

Google's founders certainly weren't concerned with their collegiate life being permanent record.

http://digg.com/tech_news/First_Google_Site_ points at http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/www-db.stanford.ed... (Sergey Brin)

They're not only out of touch with tech, they're out of touch with society as well. Changing your name is not without social stigma.

It is pretty ridiculous in the form presented. It certainly doesn't scale. Having said that, there are sometimes sensible options around changing what most people search for.

Marriage is an obvious example. But even if you are just applying for a job, if you use a different version if your name, the search results can be very different. Compare the results for "will critchlow" and "william critchlow".

But now add in a few more pieces of information. Like the city, state, country. And the type of job they are applying for. Also roughly age, previous jobs, any information listed on their resume.

By itself I agree its meaningless, but when combined with the other pieces of information the potential employer has access to it is very revealing.

Oh. Don't get me wrong, you can still dig in and find stuff, but as a simple separation of work and non-work (especially if some stuff about me did rank for both versions), it can be easier than other options.

There needs to be some kind of NoFollow attribute for 'social objects.'

I would like to see Eric Schmidt trying it himself.

Eric Schmidt's comments are being taken out of context. His statements were a warning that unless young people particularly start taking their online privacy seriously, they may be left with no recourse for erasing their online past, short of some extreme measure like changing their name. But he was not "suggesting" to change one's name - rather, he was warning about the dangers of diminished online privacy.

Unless you have a distinctive name, and the internet gets a lot better at remembering over the long term, there's still nothing to worry about.

Try finding anything from 10 years ago or for anyone named Smith, Jones, Taylor, or Patel. I'll bet that doesn't improve in the next ten years either.

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