Several years ago, a right-wing fundamentalist magazine published (and truncated) a Phoenix article of my mine, without my knowledge. A reader enamored of the piece (which had been twisted into a form Jesse Helms could love) searched the Web and eventually snagged my e- mail address. With a few clicks, a complete stranger halfway across the country found me. I'd been Googled.

The latest Webster's may not list Googling as a verb, but lexicographers are going to have to face it: Americans Google, more than they admit publicly, and they enjoy it very much. Simply type the name of someone you know into the massive search engine that is Google.com, and the virtual machine -- part ferret, part private eye -- zips into action, digging up eclectica: random photos, forgotten high-school projects, and so on into cyber-infinity. You Google to fill in the blanks about your sweetie, or to learn what a childhood pal is doing now, or perhaps for a window into the soul of the hottie in the next cubicle.

After my right-wing fan found me, the first person I Googled wasn't a stranger, it was myself -- and it brought up links seemingly to every article I'd ever written, interspersed with notices of old play performances, even papers students had written for my courses. But I already knew this stuff. So it wasn't long before I was plugging in friends' names to see what the Web knew that I didn't.

I found that my friend Tim had created a study of home pages as a grad student. His characteristic ironic amusement pervades the study's Web site, with its André the Giant graffiti, links to humor sites, and paranoid conspiracy theories. Five years later, the results of this student survey are all over the Web, but with his chuckling sensibility supplanted by the gravitas of accepted wisdom. Stuffy doctoral dissertations and college communications courses refer to the "careful" and "thorough" work of "researcher" Tim.

In Tim's case, the Google yield -- a combination of intelligence and humor deployed like a stealth bomb -- matched his personality. But sometimes, the results suggest a kind of double life. My friend Tanya -- she who wears elaborate hand-stitched costumes as a belly dancer, and no stitches at all as a Burning Man reveler -- shows up as a Bible-story illustrator. Nicole -- whose high-powered adventures took her to Hong Kong, Oslo, Ivory Coast, and Equatorial Guinea before she became vice-president of a UK company -- surfaced as the author of a homey article about baby car seats for Southern moms.

The Web seemed a bottomless well of colorful tidbits about my friends: Samantha agitating at Harvard, Jeff sniffing that a popular clam shack was tourist-quality, and Carly -- once an oversleeping, ever-procrastinating English major -- now not only a morning anchor for a CBS affiliate, but a "hot news babe," according to one fan. It was mindlessly addictive fun, as rewarding as a treasure hunt.

That remained true until I Googled a friend's new boyfriend. A strong woman and talented stage actress, Amy is one of my favorite people, but she lives in another city, so I hadn't yet met her TV-actor beau. No need to wait for an introduction -- I typed in his name and was instantly rewarded with a photo. Unfortunately, it was a recent photo of the guy and his wife, looking happy as clams at a celebrity event. It was unsettling that this should be my first image of him. Pictures can lie, of course, but two things seemed clear: his wife didn't know, and my smarter-than-that friend was the Other Woman. I'd bitten off more than I'd Googled for.

Suddenly, Googling seemed less like catching up with friends than snooping on them. It had never occurred to me that, while fun, this practice might also be a bit invasive. Because the Web is an open book, the information is fair game. But what if I'd tried to "search" friends through a pre-Web method: going to the library to track someone through newspaper articles, public records, and so on? Imagine saying to someone, "I read the funniest thing about you while looking for your name in old-newspaper microfiche files at the library!" Creepy, right?

What's the difference? In a word: effort. It would hint at obsession to invest the time and work required for an old-fashioned search for someone who isn't, say, a fugitive or your long-lost child. Comparatively, Googling requires almost no effort at all -- and less time, which somehow takes the edge off. But even so, the adulterous-boyfriend incident made me feel a little like Big Brother, enough to keep me from mentioning my Google penchant to friends.

No one else ever mentioned it either, until a dinner party last fall, when someone offhandedly referred to something they'd read on the Web about someone else. The floodgates opened: almost everyone at the table had Googled one -- or two, or five -- of the others. My husband, who Googles vicariously through me, was floored to realize that it was all the rage. For him, the lone Google virgin, it was like learning about a really excellent rave the morning after.

After that, Googling seemed okay again. I may be Big Brother, but I've got millions of siblings, and the family is growing. Whenever I feel a guilty twinge -- should I really be looking up an old boyfriend to see if his secret gay life is ruining his political career yet? -- I remind myself of the golden rule of the Internet age: Google unto others as you know they will Google unto you.

David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at valdesgreenwood@worldnet.att.net.

Issue Date: February 15 - 21, 2002