One thing I've wanted to write about for a very long time is the fact that though Google is known in popular parlance as a search engine, it would be more appropriate to actually call it an indexer, and a giant one at that. This little nugget of information may seem like a petty distinction to most (if at all "most" know what an indexer means); however, trust me when I say that this fact can have some very strange, unintended, and at times unnerving consequences for many people.
Let me explain. A couple days back, my wife logged into her Facebook account and squealed out: "Look what so and so has written," – so and so here referring to a relative who is both on her contact list as well as mine. Now, if you have used Facebook for any amount of time, you will realize that you cannot do anything there without your business associates, your relatives, your next door neighbor and his dog, finding out about it in near-zero time. (I call it the digital equivalent of changing in a house with walls of glass, but more on that some other time.) Anyway, getting back to my relative's post, I realized something was amiss there... it just didn't sound like him. I don’t know why I had this funny feeling that he may have plagiarized this off somewhere.
I copied a part of that text, fired off my browser, pasted the copied text into the Google search box, and ended up with something like a zillion sites that referred to one part of that text or the other, which was quite useless for me. To narrow down the search, I next quoted the entire text, and hey, presto, Google threw up precisely one site, a newspaper, where among the long list of letters to the editor, one particular reader from the US of A had written in with the exact same text. The entire letter had been picked up by “so and so” and posted verbatim on Facebook. The whole process of finding this out took me less than half a minute… nope, even less, I would say somewhere between ten and fifteen seconds. At the end of it, my wife had that “you’re a genius” look on her face, the kind of look that a man could climb a mountain for. I did not have the heart to tell her that it was nothing extraordinary on my part; any Google user worth their salt could have done it, but then who wants to argue, especially when I’ve nothing to lose with my lady?
So much for creative copying… why won’t Google just leave us alone??? Ah, my friends, I’m afraid the good ol’ days of plagiarizing other peoples’ content and getting away with impunity are long gone, more so in the digital world. (Some day I will write about what indexing really means and its consequences for most of us.) So the next time you are on the www, and are tempted to use the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V key combos, think again.
But wait, it gets better. One of the things I do when I join a new company (yes, I’m old enough to say that I’ve worked in many of them) is to google for information on all the employees who are associated with me and my work. In fact, in one of the companies that I worked for, I surprised a colleague by telling that his father was a doctor in Gorakhpur, along with a few other pertinent details. Prior to this, the only pieces of information I had of him were his name and the city he came from, which was, of course, Gorakhpur. I would recommend you try this for any of your friends and unless s/he has been away from civilization for the past few years cloistered away in a monastery, you should find something interesting about them.
Go on, try it, I'll wait. In the mean time I will try and figure out how to cloak my information that’s already out there.
