One of my favorite wastes of time on the Internet is to Google myself. For those few who really don’t know (minus the ones who just claim not to know), it’s what you do when you enter your name into a search engine, usually the one found at Google.com.

For instance, it is by Googling "Linda Sherwood" (with the quotation marks) that I learned there are more than 11 Linda Sherwoods in Michigan. Not to mention the ones not in Michigan. Some are athletic. Others serve on library boards. There’s one the communication committee of a church in Wisconsin with her husband, Ben. There’s a hair dresser with a salon in Loveland, Colorado. I wonder if my aunt and uncle (Sherwoods, both) who live in Loveland are familiar with it. She even has a web site, SalonSherwood.com and apparently you are required to look very good to work there. A professor in Montana who has written more than one book about microbiology. She’s riding high on her success in England and the Salisbury District Council. On the health and human service staff in Oregon. And something to do with horses. I thought my friend Teri was the Field Trip Lady, but apparently there’s a Linda Sherwood in Michigan that provides field trip resources as well. Not to mention the Linda that’s made it to the championships in bowling, which is so not me, as my family could attest to my average score of 60.

Not to mention, for $29.95 you can purchase a company profile of "LindaSherwood.com" and get immediate online access from Goliath. Apparently the company LindaSherwood.com is involved in "Game, Toy, and Children’s Vehicle Manufacturing." No wonder my house is always so messy! Trust me when I say Thompson and Dale of Goliath haven’t a clue about the manufacturing capabilities, or rather lack thereof, here at LindaSherwood.com. Is should come as no surprise that I do not recommend buying that report. But if you’d like, you can send me $29,95 and I’d be happy to indulge all of my company secrets. Heck, send half that and I’ll do the same. Although you can probalby just Google the info.

So it is with a great deal of irony that I share the following set of news articles regarding Google’s CEO, and the apparent grief it caused when a reporter armed with only 30 minutes and Google.com turned up some personal information on the search engine’s CEO using the company’s own search engine. Who knew it worked so well? Apparently not CEO Eric Schmidt.

Googler outs Google chief is a Susan Ager column in the Detroit Free Press. It starts, "If there’s anything more laughable than a hypocrite, it’s got to be a billionaire hypocrite indignant that his golden goose dumped on him."

Then there’s the original C-Net article by Elinor Mills, Google balance privacy, reach

And the New York Times reports on the fall out from Mills article in Google anything, so long as it’s not Google

Thanks for playing.