"Googling" has become the latest fashion for increasing numbers of information-hungry Americans using the Internet search engine Google to find out more about each other.
Of the 150 million questions to the most powerful search engine every day, the majority are from individuals trying to investigate other individuals.
"When I was looking for a flat-mate, I googled all those who said they were interested," said Isabelle, a young French journalist living in Manhattan, who asked that her last name not be used.
"Some guy tells you `I work for this company,' boom, you google them to see if it's true. You can see right away exactly what their position is, something that doesn't exactly please them."
The Internet has penetrated all sectors of American society to the point that biography research, work, articles, even electronic messages otherwise hard to find are available with a quick click of the mouse.
"The person I finally chose, Ali, I googled him a lot: I found that he once had a speeding ticket in Connecticut," Isabelle smiled.
As more and more documents are placed online, by every sector of US society, googling has become an ever more powerful tool to get information on complete stranger's lives, careers, preferences, hobbies and bad habits.
"In the early days, the only people that would appear on Google were people who were famous. You had to be a journalist, an executive, a researcher," said David Holtzman, chief editor of GlobalPOV, an Internet site dedicated to personal privacy issues.
"Now, so many people are interacting with the Internet that almost anyone that uses a computer sooner or later will show up in Google somewhere."
"The implications are huge: it will not go away. Even if the website goes down, Google always can find you. Anyone has to assume that once something is in a electronic form, it will probably be around forever. And the nature of the web makes that it can't be regulated."
Others are now regretting past jokes: putting online compromising pictures for the amusement of a few friends; listing latest erotica, declaring themselves anarchists or even high school pranks.
"People are given less flexebility to present themselves as they choose, because others can gather so many information thanks to this phenomenon of so much information migrating to the public Internet and being searchable with Google," commented Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
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