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My Amazon wish list shows up in Google search results

Flowbee

Flowbee

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Dec 27, 2002
2,943
0
Alameda, CA
This is a new one. I google my name pretty regularly to keep track of what information is showing up in the search results. I've been getting the same results pretty consistently for a while, but today I noticed a link to my Amazon.com "wish list" in my first page of Google results. I have never seen it on any of my search results pages before.

If you have an Amazon wish list under your real name, this is something to be aware of. While we expect employers today to Google our names when checking our background, we generally don't expect them to search Amazon for our wish lists. Now they don't have to.

Your Amazon wish list can tell an employer many things about you which could influence the hiring decision. If you're looking for a job, you may want to remove the cannabis growing guides, hentai, and Bill O'Reilly books from your wish list temporarily.

Obviously, we should always be aware of everything we're putting online under our real names, but this just jumped out and surprised me today. Don't let it surprise you.
 
Be sure to select the "View page as seen by: Everyone" option to make sure people see what you think they're seeing - by default, it shows as you see it (assuming you're using cookies).

Interesting....
 
Happy to report that I made my wish list private yesterday, and now it's gone from my search results.
 
Flowbee said:
This is a new one. I google my name pretty regularly to keep track of what information is showing up in the search results. I've been getting the same results pretty consistently for a while, but today I noticed a link to my Amazon.com "wish list" in my first page of Google results. I have never seen it on any of my search results pages before.

If you have an Amazon wish list under your real name, this is something to be aware of. While we expect employers today to Google our names when checking our background, we generally don't expect them to search Amazon for our wish lists. Now they don't have to.

Your Amazon wish list can tell an employer many things about you which could influence the hiring decision. If you're looking for a job, you may want to remove the cannabis growing guides, hentai, and Bill O'Reilly books from your wish list temporarily.

Obviously, we should always be aware of everything we're putting online under our real names, but this just jumped out and surprised me today. Don't let it surprise you.
Click to expand...

That's why I tell people to never post anything on the net that you don't want lots of other people to see, for instance, even if someone were to delete their account and all their posts on MR that info is still cached all over the net via search spiders crawling MR at regular intervals...

Ahh, the joys of search spiders crawling your site and indexing your pages so that search engines can attach rank and relevancy to those webpages...

Not only will that info be on Google but may also be on all the other major search engines as well. :)
 
I'm always happy to report that the people who bare my same name are always way hotter than I am. It's awesome really.
 
jessica. said:
I'm always happy to report that the people who bare my same name are always way hotter than I am. It's awesome really.
Click to expand...
They all live along the equator?

For me, the image search never brings up my pic, but everyone it does bring up looks pretty average, so I suppose that's appropriate.
 
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