No. I’m Sorry. It’s not AskJeeves.
Google.com is 22 years old. Still too young for me, but thats okay. It was created in 1996 by Stanford students and gradually became the largest search engine of all time. It now manages eight different products with more than 1 billion users each. For more history of Google, you can read this article by TheVerge.
Google plays an integral part in probably every internet users’ life. Even if you’re a Bing guy *eye roll*. I probably mention Google on average 7 times per day. At this rate, I should probably be married to the thing. No, but in all seriousness I chose to blog about the massive search engine because there are a few special ways it can be related to social media.
For starters, the term SEO (search engine optimization) refers to increasing the quantity of traffic to a website based on where it falls on a search engine. Every business who uses a website for the public wants to be high on the search list, or at least on the first page. Lyfe Marketing discusses how social media activities can boost your company’s SEO. For example, when you google WordPress, the first four search results are directly from wordpress and the last results include guides on how to use WordPress.
Another creative way that Google assists with social media has to do with the term “Catfish.”
A popular MTV show called “Catfish” shows two men, Nev and Max, going around the country meeting people who are suspicious about a person they have been “dating” online and want some help finding out if this person is who they say they are. In a lot of cases Nev and Max use a reverse Google image search to search a photo of a suspected catfisher to see if the photo comes up anywhere else online. You don’t have to be an MTV reality TV host to do reverse image searches on Google. Just google how to do it.
Aside from the MTV show, meeting people online can be a scary thing. Personally, to ensure my safety as much as possible, I will google a person that I meet online to make sure they are who they say they are. Google has the potential to open the door to a bunch of social profile investigators.
Google can also either be useful or damning for employers searching for potential new employees. Careerbuilder suggests that more than half of employers have found content on social media that has caused them not to hire someone. And this content mostly comes from a quick google search of someone’s name. Be very careful what you post out there, and adjust your privacy settings to make double sure.
Now, I’m gonna go head to the kitchen, eat some tacos, and reflect on when it is or is not appropriate to capitalize the word “Google”.
The Social Ginger 