Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Getting searched!!

With graduation so close by, our professors and advisors keep warning us about what to put on our Facebooks. I used to not listen to them until I started taking Social Network Marketing for my Social Media concentration. My professor gave our class numbers about how putting up bad pictures and statuses could really hurt us, and since stats and cold hard facts make me listen, I checked over my own site to make sure my grandmother, or a future employer, could see it. More recently than this lecture, I saw an article on CNN "Could Facebook be bluffing on search-engine plans?" that was talking about how Bing and Facebook may join forces so that you could search people more easily. The real reason behind this is because Facebook is such a huge force on the web that it is messing with Bing's search results. 

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's pretty crazy, but not hard to believe, that Facebook is such a huge force on the internet that it is effecting how things are searched. I think that having a strictly social search would be a smart move for the companies with search engines and also a good way to creep on future employees. I know this is just another warning about what not to put on Facebook, but these guys are making it easier to find you. What are your thoughts? Do you think this will happen anytime soon, or do you think bigger companies are willing to finance something like this so that they can search future employees faster and more efficiently?

3 comments:

  1. I think that this would be good for the companies when wanting to find someone quickly, but I don't think that I would want just anyone to be able to find me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think it will eventually come to a point where they will combine forces to make it easier to find people. But, I wonder what effect the "private" settings of profiles will have on the search results. If I am completely set to private, except my name and profile picture will that really do any good for a company to search me? If thats the case, why doesn't everyone be smart and have their's set to private in the first place?

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is incredibly scary to me. I am usually pretty good about not posting explicit information on my social media, but I do not want people to 'search' my name and have some random person's information pop up. This is great in terms of finding specific information on people and places--but terrible if you happen to share your name with a individual who has a terrible online presence.

    ReplyDelete