How to google someone

narommy

Exactly what it says on the tin.

How do I go about googling people ( I presume googling is looking for contact details) That "Get with it" ad has got to me. I've never found contact detais for people on the net unless i knew exactly where to look.

I'm not an old foggey (26) but I might be heading that way.

Goodshape

Type in their name and hit the search button I suppose.

BigEejit

I'm guessing that he might have tried that ... he is more likely looking for phone numbers etc for people .... to be honest i dont think he will have much luck with that, but if he doesnt look he'll never know ...

For a start, you should search for the two parts of their name beside each other ... e.g. by typing in "Joe Soap" (with the " & ")

Alvis

You might also want to put quotation marks on the name you are searching for. For example, "Joe Bloggs".

This prevents google from finding pages where the first name and the surname are not next to each other.

jor el

That ad is a load of bollox. It goes something like "I googled him to get his hotmail". There's no practical way in the world you could find someone's email address by doing a search for their name. I just googled for my friend John O'Neill's hotmail address and came up blank. I know his hotmail address and it was not listed among the first few pages of results anyway.

If the person you are looking for happened to have a webpage with their full name and details on for all to see then it might work. Unless it's for some sort of business (or fating service perhaps), only an idiot would put all their contact details on the web for all to see.

Wertz

Googling someone, like everything else WWW-ish, is primarily an American phenomenon.
It isn't just looking for contact details...it's looking for any info online about that person. Great idea if you want to find out if a prospective partner has ever been in front of a judge, or how someone you went to school with got on in college or anyting else you might want to know.

It's not going to work so well over here just yet as so much less of our data is published and/or stored on public networks.

BTW what's a "Get with it" campaign and why is recommending googling people?

SolarNexus

you can get that sort of stuff on the web, it just costs money and a lot of experience.

best option I know of is geneology websites.

Syth

It would work best if the person was in business and their work phone number etc, were on the business's website. Not many people fall into that category.

jor el

Wertz wrote:

BTW what's a "Get with it" campaign and why is recommending googling people?

It's a new campaign launched by some crowd to educate parents on what their children are talking about when they use net language like googling, hotmail, flame, etc. The ad is terrible though It uses just about every internet buzz word in one sentance. But I guess that's the point of the ad, to convey how parents haven't a clue what their kids are talking about. All they hear is a stream of mindless jibberish.

robinph

Just type in their name within quotes and see what comes up.

I've tried this for various family members, and for one of my brothers pretty much all of the first couple of pages of results are for him and almost as many results for when I enter my dads name, but then they do have a lot of stuff up on the interweb. No one else I know is unique enough though to appear anywhere on a search for their name though.

briano

Its much more fun to "googlisim" someone - www.googlism.com

WizZard

jor el wrote:

But I guess that's the point of the ad, to convey how parents haven't a clue what their kids are talking about. All they hear is a stream of mindless jibberish.

In fairness, I'm very techie and all I hear is mindless gibberish too...

stevenmu

I agree with Wizzard, it's definitly mind-less gibberish. There should be a law to prevent non-techie people (especially managers and marketing types) trying to use techie buzzwords.

Sully

stevenmu wrote:

I agree with Wizzard, it's definitly mind-less gibberish. There should be a law to prevent non-techie people (especially managers and marketing types) trying to use techie buzzwords.

lol true.

I never was aware there was a special search engine technique for looking up people?! Sounds a bit of a privacy breach to me...

Khannie

lol@wizzard.

Thought this was a troll initially, but I have heard the ad on the radio. The idea behind it is to deliberately use buzzwords (though not necessarily coherently) e.g. "I googled his hotmail but he flamed me" or something. Obvious pants.

This crowd are trying to introduce otherwise technophobes into the world of technology. A good idea.

Narommy: Maybe you should get the booklet they're advertising? (not being smart). It's free if I remember correctly.

Khannie

Sully04 wrote:

I never was aware there was a special search engine technique for looking up people?! Sounds a bit of a privacy breach to me...

Ah, it's more knowing how to use the search engines advanced features properly. I used to have to do searches as part of my job in the pre-google days (god bless altavista) so you get to know all the "tricks of the trade".

Example is: spears -britney
It searches for "spears" but excludes pages which match the word "britney" (if you were searching for the throwing kind this would be useful).

Sully

Khannie wrote:

Ah, it's more knowing how to use the search engines advanced features properly. I used to have to do searches as part of my job in the pre-google days (god bless altavista) so you get to know all the "tricks of the trade".

Example is: spears -britney
It searches for "spears" but excludes pages which match the word "britney" (if you were searching for the throwing kind this would be useful).

Thats pretty handy.. but sure how are we supposed to know these advanced features ourselfs? :P

WizZard

Go here. Fill in terms. Then see the resulting query.
Learn from that - that's pretty much what I 've done.

But then again since Google and Yahoo's inception '+' means include and '-' means exclude the following term. You can also use boolean operations on the text query.

Phibsboro

Hey,

This is an interesting thread I too thought that ad was a little fishy, but not for the google bit - unfortunately I can't remember what bit it was though! Google ain't giving up a script for the ad...

As for google and email addresses, i googled my own name and my *home* email address (not my hotmail or gmail, my real isp one) is in the first hit. The joys of posting to mail groups in more innocent days. I have used google before to find mail addresses for other people. I even frightened the life out of a new acquaintance by mailing them a picture of themselves that came off google (local paper, accepting an award in school or something). So the concept of googling to find someones mail address is defo something a kid would try. Obviously there is an element of luck in finding the exact address the lad uses for msn but again its always worth trying. Saying he flames her prolly isn't the right terminology cos if I recall correctly she says she im'ed him and he flamed her cos he didn't know it was her. Flaming isn't really something associated with a one on one thing like IM.

Its a pity I can't recall the ad exactly, but the combination of blogs, searches and IM is a valid one for many kids and its definitely a world their parents need to know about.

C

WizZard

The booklet can be found here (PDF).

Khannie

HAHAHA. The irony. The booklet is in a format that lots of people who are computer illiterate wont know how to use. Muppets.

I had to go down to someones house before and install acrobat reader because they had no idea what to do with .pdf files. If you're trying to distribute a booklet on how to use the internet on the internet then it really should be in html with a printable version.

Wertz

But to be fair the booklet does make some sense of things to complete n00bs.

I caught this ad on the radio today...cringeworthy to say the least, but at least someone's trying to close the gap for the technically illiterate.
At the same time I was amazed at the stuff they omitted....for instance it doesn't really hammer home the message on illegal file sharing, something that parents actually need to know about since it is they who are liable for the children's behaviour in this regard...

As for pdf
Do pdfs open in IE6? I know they open in FF when you have Adobe reader installed...

WizZard

Wertz wrote:

when you have Adobe reader installed...

I think Khannie meant that an awful lot of technically illiterate people won't have that installed, nor know how to.

Wertz

WizZard wrote:

I think Khannie meant that an awful lot of technically illiterate people won't have that installed, nor know how to.

Oh I know what he meant....it was just a general OT question...

I know way back when, I didn't know what you had to do with a direct link to a pdf....in fairness most websites offering a pdf will offer Adobe Reader for a free d/l on an adjoining page.
His point stands on it having should been in html for simplicity's sake...

_Turismo4

wrote:

Exactly what it says on the tin.

How do I go about googling people ( I presume googling is looking for contact details) That "Get with it" ad has got to me. I've never found contact detais for people on the net unless i knew exactly where to look.

I'm not an old foggey (26) but I might be heading that way.

To be honest you can get that stuff on the web, as far as I know you would have to pay money..!

Capt'n Midnight

Khannie wrote:

I used to have to do searches as part of my job in the pre-google days (god bless altavista) so you get to know all the "tricks of the trade".

stupid question, I must have a mental block on this but...

you used to be able to use the keyword "near" on altavista to find when words where near each other rather than being exactly beside each other.

how do you do this in google ?

WizZard

Google doesn't support the NEAR keyword

Martyr

Googling someone, like everything else WWW-ish, is primarily an American phenomenon.

If you know the right people in society, its not difficult to dig up personal
information on other people, for a fee, of course.

Phibsboro

WizZard wrote:

Google doesn't support the NEAR keyword

it does have something very similar though in the "*" operator - so for example dublin * bus will hit Dublin Airport Bus first rather than Dublin Bus...

tba

according to this booklet my fridge will be to download redipies from the internet pretty soon. The question is what is it going to to with them... huh? Its not like it's going to cook them, after all thats the ovens job and that guy cant do anything without me.

PS 10s ne1?

WizZard

tba wrote:

PS 10s ne1?

Exactly! What sort of 'tard texts like that?

tba

WizZard wrote:

Exactly! What sort of 'tard texts like that?

tennis fans

pickarooney

You need that program Veronica Mars uses, everythign about everyone is in that.

Gurgle

A name and a town will get you an address and phone number from Eircom , assuming they're in the phone book.

My name in Google will get you my student number & the courses I did.

rubadub

A good way of teaching the + - "" stuff is trying to find a beer expert called michael jackson

type
michael jackson
you get every page which has either michael or jackson

+michael +jackson
pages must have both words

"michael jackson"
pages must have the words in that order

+"michael jackson" -thriller -music
cuts out some music websites on mj

+"michael jackson" -thriller -music +beer +review
cuts out the remaining music sites that do not have beer or review mentioned.

You can then narrow it down culling and including words all the time.

Anyways, I googled your ma last night. All I got was 4 hits, from your da