re: #221 Pianobuff

Asking this question reminds me of something I’ve been wondering about for a while. In the Internet age, I wonder how much vetting takes place by having staff Google stuff endlessly. It seems like that’s how many of the gotcha’s come up nowadays and I’d be curious to know if it’s part of the standard contemporary vetting protocol.

Internet searches of various types are common in hiring these days. I have no doubt they’re used for vetting purposes, as well.

The problem, exemplified well in this particular case, is how deep you want to bother digging. Most of the useful information about anyone is going to appear in the first page or two of results - digging farther than that, normally, all you encounter is noise. Here, we have a single occurrence of Jones’ name on a single page with low visitation rates - no search engine is going to rank this very high, especially in the case of Jones, whose CV is very long and where there are enormous volumes of Web material devoted to him. No one is ever going to minutely scrutinize the tens of thousands of pages Jones’ name appears on, and the Troofer site is going to be way down near the bottom anyway.

And even if it were found, it’s so obviously a fake - with absolutely no credible evidence backing it up, and from a source that’s known for lying and forging exactly such documents - that no rational person would ever take it seriously.