Caught in the net

Ori Steinman was shocked to discover he had been abducted 14 years ago. While fooling around with classmates one day at school, the Californian teenager punched his name into Google. The results pointed him to a missing persons site, on which he found his photo and a caption explaining he had not been seen in his home town in Canada since he was three.

As a result of that search, he found out his mother had fled the family home all those years ago, taking him with her. He had little recollection of the event that had doubtless been brushed under the carpet by his mother. Giselle Marie Gubrot was eventually arrested in February and her son handed over to Los Angeles foster-care services. The case is proceeding through the courts. Steinman's life, as far as he could remember it, had been undone at the touch of a button.

Then on Tuesday came the news that an Australian journalist kidnapped in Iraq, John Martinkus, had been freed after his captors Googled his name and discovered he wasn't who they thought he was.

It is perhaps the most extreme example of self-Googling - typing your name into the search field to see where you really stand in the internet's vast digital plains. For most of us, our motivation is purely to have a laugh at the expense of our Google-gangers - those who share our names and, thankfully, nothing else.

Yet Google, in its ability to search millions of web pages and make information ludicrously easy to retrieve, is increasingly informing the way we live. Unless you live on the mainland, of course, where it was banned in 2002 for exactly those reasons. It has taken over where filing cabinets used to stand and, in many cases, where brains had to fill the gaps. Who needs libraries when, with a single mouse click, the search engine will bring the world to your screen in the time it takes to type 'Google'? It is perhaps the most important search tool since the invention of the battery-powered torch.

In our curiosity, we've turned this lightning-quick illumination on ourselves; 'cyberchondriacs' might Google their runny nose and convince themselves they have only months to live. A little 'self-Googling' can also be a cruel exposition of your place in the world. For most of us, the results of self-searching are pretty disappointing. The