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Remember that 'doogling' works both ways ... Photograph: Stephen Hird/Reuters
Remember that 'doogling' works both ways ... Photograph: Stephen Hird/Reuters

Should you Google your date?

This article is more than 15 years old
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You're bored, you're sitting in front of a computer and you have a first date in the next few days. Should you Google? It'll only take a minute. What harm can it do?

There are lots of reasons why you would. Leaving aside the force of raw curiosity, you might actually uncover something you urgently need to know. Like the woman in New York in 2004 who Googled her date and found an FBI warrant for his arrest. He'd been on the run for a year after allegedly stealing around $100,000. She didn't turn up for dinner that Friday; the Feds agreed to stand in.

On many levels, date Googling ("doogling"?) has become socially acceptable, despite the fact that this information could once only have come from a private detective. Zara Percy, director of reassuringly offline dating agency The County Register and all-round romance expert, says: "I think the majority of people will do it if they know the person's surname. It's hard to resist, and it doesn't make you a bunny boiler." But, she adds: "It may put you in a difficult situation where you know something you shouldn't and then have to feign ignorance when it is mentioned."

The trouble is that the one situation where it's not comfortable to discuss your findings is on the date itself. If you've already discovered that he or she once won a Bafta, or spent three years learning throat-singing in Mongolia, you will find yourself steering conversation in that direction. Things become stilted; the spirit of mutual discovery isn't quite what it ought to be. Not only that, you run the risk of forgetting what you've been told and what you're not meant to know yet. You ask him how his pet bunny is and he peers at you oddly.

Whatever we decide, there is still a big chance that our date has Googled us: a recent survey in the US put the "doogling" figure at 43% and it's hard to imagine it's less in the UK. This means Googling ourselves is no longer the province of the merely vain, but a virtual mirror that we should perhaps start checking.

Exasperatingly, it's often odd material that rises to the top of the web and threatens to define us: an online petition we signed aeons ago, an old essay for the student paper, a comment we left on a website then forgot about. Hardly anything to do with who we really are, then. It's not as if there is a one-stop shop with a comprehensive gallery of images and videos and a list of all our friends …

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