It turns out that when he strips off everything but a pair of skimpy bathing briefs, one of the company's founders is quite the California hunk. He also makes a fetching debutante in a frilly white dress and come-hither smile.

These are the photos you can find when you "google" Sergey Brin, the co-president of the world's most popular search engine.

The easy availability of these images online, which date from Brin's student days at Stanford University, is an ironic lesson in the unsettling tendency of the Internet to memorialize artifacts of our lives we might rather conceal -- or forget.

Brin probably doesn't mind, but he looks good in lace. Not everyone is so lucky.

In 2000, Merritt Lear left her job with the "Jenny Jones" television program in Chicago. Her final duty as a content manager for the talk show's Web site was to interview and hire a replacement.

"This girl comes in, and she's giving a decent interview," said Lear. "I asked her if she's had any experience working on any other Web sites or writing online, and she said she had."

Lear decided to plug the prospective hire's name into an Internet search engine, to find samples of her work.

"She started begging and pleading with me to stop," Lear recalled. "She literally looked like she was about to cry."

It didn't take more than a few seconds for Lear to find what the interviewee didn't want her prospective employer to see: an article she had once authored for an online magazine that specialized in confessional, anti-establishment screeds for and by twenty-something women.

"It was all about the job she had just left and how she had seduced a coworker, and how he had destroyed her career, and now she was bitter about it," Lear said.

Not the sort of information that inspires confidence in a hiring manager.

"Naturally, it would make you worry that if you hired her she would come into the office and write articles about her sexual exploits with everyone," Lear said. "And believe me, there were a lot of sexual exploits going on in our office."

Lear recommended someone else for the job.

Tales of electronic skeletons popping out of the virtual closet have proliferated in pace with the growing use of the Internet as a sleuthing tool. Employers increasingly use the engines to check out prospective hires, and individuals use them to check out each other.

In January, a fugitive named LaShawn Pettus-Brown was caught in Cincinnati after a year on the lam when a woman he was dating looked him up on Google and found an FBI warrant for his arrest.

In another recently celebrated case, a London public relations rep accidentally sent a sexually explicit e-mail to her boyfriend -- and 30 of his co-workers. They promptly forwarded the saucy note all over the Net.

The woman's name and the contents of her most intimate thoughts will very likely be linked together on the Web for years to come.

As the practice of "google-stalking" or "google-hacking" becomes commonplace, Internet users will probably become more circumspect about the sort of personal information they release online.

"My expectations of personal privacy have changed considerably," said Tim Bishop, who authors a popular online journal, or blog, under the handle Geodog.

Bishop, a technology product manager in California's Silicon Valley, is scrupulous about not publishing names or photos of his family on any of his numerous Web sites. He says he periodically monitors his sites -- which also contain messages posted by his readers -- for any mention of his wife or children.

"I think we will certainly evolve to a world of more unlisted numbers and a world in which home addresses and family information perhaps may become a little more protected," agreed Tim Sullivan, founder of Match.com, whose thriving online dating service is a major contributor to the google-stalking phenomenon.

But Sullivan thinks using the Web for background searches will ultimately have a beneficial impact on contemporary culture -- at least on the online dating scene. The likelihood of being google-stalked encourages Match.com customers to be more honest when marketing themselves to one another, he said.

"There's simply absolutely no rational reason to lie about something core in my life today, or in my history, when more and more of that information can be independently verified," said Sullivan.

Of course, the truth is often precisely the problem.

Once it's on the Web, how do you erase that bachelor-party photo posted on an online album, the intemperate message board post dashed off in a moment of anger, or the confessional piece of writing which seemed edgy in college but is mortifying in retrospect?

The bad news is, in most cases, you can't. Unless you can demonstrate a violation of copyright or libel law, you can't compel Web sites administrators and search engines to remove personally identifiable references.

"What the Web does is give everyone a simple key to all the corners and closets of your life," said Lear, the former Jenny Jones employee. "The old embarrassing photos aren't in a shoe box in your grandma's attic anymore. They're on someone's server and will come up if you type the right keyword."

However, users may be able to "hide" embarrassing material by manipulating the search engines' operating methods.

Google displays search results according to popularity. One way to avoid google-stalkers from finding Web pages that bother you is to elevate the popularity of ones that don't. After all, if the embarrassing link is several pages deep on the search results, it will be effectively invisible to all but the most dogged google-stalkers.

"I would fill up the Web with information about me that I generate myself," Bishop said. "My approach would be to flood [the Internet] with data that you want people to see about you, because there's going to be data you don't want them to see."

But simply creating self-flattering Web pages won't ensure they appear at the top of Google search results.

Happily, there's an entire industry devoted to "search engine optimization," and publications like searchenginewatch.com contain useful tips about increasing the visibility of targeted Web sites.

Of course, this strategy is made considerably more difficult when the offending material is itself already popular with Internet users.

Of the more than 53,800 Web sites that Google retrieves from a search on "Sergey Brin," the one that links to a photo of the Google founder in drag ranks seventh.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2004 by United Press International. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by United Press International. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of by United Press International.

Related Links
SpaceDaily
Search SpaceDaily
Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only