By Kashmir Hill - Forbes"Much has been written about Google and Facebook’s war for control of the Internet (This 2009 Wired piece is one of my favorites). How hard have you thought about who you want to win that war? And how do you feel about it when you think of it as your Google search results page versus your Facebook profile in determining how you’re perceived on the Internet?
Right now, Google (and Bing and Yahoo) are our main gateways to get to the best the Internet has to offer (ideally), whereas Facebook is our gateway to what’s best on the Internet according to our friends. (Of course, given the escalating nature of the war, Google now plans to incorporate “social” into its search.)
The search giants’ algorithms’ dictation of discovery on the web has been much discussed and criticized recently — including here at Forbes. All the talk of search has me thinking about a topic near and dear to the Not-So Private Parts’ heart: our personal Google footprints.
Facebook gets criticized quite frequently for its exposure of our personal information. Yet, in many ways, we have so much control there. We can untag ourselves from photos. We can flag them for abuse and get them taken down. We can block people that we don’t want to have access to our information. We can set privacy settings high.
Google, by contrast, is the Wild West of reputation. I’m lucky. I get to control my Google search results for the most part, since I’m regularly churning out new material under my name and to search-optimized news sites. Most people are not so lucky, nor so prolific.
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