Following the natural consequence of Dan Solove’s excellent book, The Future of Reputation, comes David Thompson’s post at Volokh Conspiracy about how the ubiquitous Googling of people has fundamentally altered the landscape.

Online, Google search drops users onto a website with no context or history of the site.  There’s no indication whether a site is a parody (witness Salon being fooled by Landover Baptist), populated by anonymous trolls, a personal rant, or anything else.

Google has elevated the ramblings of a lone speaker to the same visibility as the New York Times.  This is a wonderful development for politics and freedom.  It is a frightening development for personal privacy.

In the old days, the major media (think New York Times) was very unlikely to write about you.  Your privacy was generally at the mercy of your neighbors and acquaintances—who often had to stake their own reputations when they chose to attack yours.

But today, anybody with a blog can (and all too often does) smear you, defame you, or invade your privacy.  Their motivations are many: politics (if you read VC, you might have strong opinions), envy (think job promotion), mischief (think 4chan), etc.  If you don’t have a big presence in Google before being attacked, Google will inevitably find the smear and bring it to the top of your search results: and tabloid material often rises to the top of a Google search because it gets the most clicks and attention.

According to Thompson, “Google creates the illusion that just ten search results reflect some meaningful judgment on a person’s life.”  Via Scoresearcher, he notes that the first five results get 88% of the clicks. 

A running “joke” around the blawgosphere is that you are what Google says you are.  It didn’t start as a joke, but as a serious proposition by Adrianos Facchetti at one of the most ridiculous blogs around, Blog for Profit.  Adrianos offered the proposition in support of his contention that any moron could create an internet persona of expertise by playing Google.  Of course, he neglected to mention that creating the appearance of expertise isn’t exactly the same as having it, but then, that’s the nature of the beast.

What’s often unappreciated by non-geeks and people with lives is how much effort is put into search engine ranking, “optimization”, to get one’s site onto that first page of Google, and the holy grail, the top five.  There is an industry built solely to do this, and people pay good money for these services.

Some sites rise to the top of Google organically, meaning that they just do what they do and, because of popularity or interest, obtain enough of the secret magic Google juice that they show up high on the list, no effort expended.  But most don’t want to put in the effort to build a site (or a blog) of sufficient merit to reach that height on its own.  Moreover, they want it now, and organic growth takes way too long.  Who has the time to wait for earning the position? 

The other day, I mentioned in a post that it would be great if others put my name in a blog post to push a nutjob who wrote garbage about me off the second page.  Though I expected everybody to get a laugh out of my post, the reaction was amazing, and I was humbled by the unanticipated support.  Thanks to all.  But it makes Thompson’s point quite clearly, as the craziest lunatic with a computer can cause mischief.  It’s no reflection of his importance, though in nutjob land I’m sure it would appear to feel that way, but merely the ability to type on a page so that Google picks it up.

Are blawgs the functional equivalent of, say, the New York Times?  Some are and others aren’t.  Some are better, some are worse.  But without a significant degree of sophistication on a subject, or knowledge of the background of a blawg, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to know.  Yet, if they are at the top of the first page of Google, many well-intended people will accept them as gospel.

As anyone who has become embroiled to any meaningful extent in internet culture has learned, there is no control over this.  Worse still, as new people adopt technology, they frequently make well-intended but mind-bogglingly dumb mistakes without the slightest appreciation of the consequences of their actions. 

For example, a good friend posted a twit to me the other day, asking a question that suggested horrific conduct on my part in order to ridicule something a nutjob claimed about me.  It was meant as a joke, but it would thereafter be searchable in Google.  It would be easily found, since twitter is always close to the top of the Google results, and coming from my friend, it carried far greater credibility than it would had the nutjob twitted it.  Yet he had no idea that his little joke had such broad ramifications.  As n00bs enter the room, clueless about how this newfangled technology works, the danger increases exponentially.

Thompson offers no solution to the problem, and I doubt that there will be any found.  Google has indeed leveled the playing field, and given every nutjob or moron the ability to have a voice heard.  Since we “are” what Google says we are, at least as far as the ignorant masses are concerned, we could well be in for a rough ride.