Private And Confidential

Steve Outing reports in the Poynter Institute e-Media Tidbits newsletter that his friend Chris Sherman, search engine expert (editor of SearchEngineWatch and author of the upcoming book Google Power) has shared with him a confidential story that is quite surprising.

Chris Sherman told him to try out on Google the following search: "private and confidential".

"While many are innocent enough, scan through the results and you'll find many real personal and confidential documents that people have put on their Web servers but not bothered to keep search-engine bots from
indexing them.

Wow.

So what?

Well, it shows that too many people don't treat online security seriously.

Maybe it's a wake-up call for you to make sure you don't have things open to search-engine indexing that shouldn't be.

If you're a reporter, maybe it's a fascinating Google-related story idea."

Anyone in this boat?