Google Me, Please

Sometimes creepy results come up when I do a vanity search. What? Of course I run a search on my own name, and if you were honest, you’d admit that you do it, too. Who’d have thought it might, just might, some day save your life? John Martinkus, an Australian reporter, might have had such a notion; and in Bagdhad it came true. Militants kidnapped and threatened to kill him until they entered his name into the world’s most popular search engine. Then they checked the Web site for him or his book publisher, his producer Mike Carey told the Associated Press.

“They checked on him to see if he was who he said he was,” Carey said. “They Googled him and then went onto a Web site - either his own or his book publisher’s Web site, I don’t know which one - and saw that he was who he was, and that was instrumental in letting him go, I think, or swinging their decision.”

I think the scenario ran differently, however, because Googling the author’s name does not readily return his Web site, if he has one, nor the name of the book or a publisher’s Web site. I finally tracked it down at Amazon to find Martinkus’ Travels in American Iraq was published by Black, Inc. on 10/01/04. An editorial review by Amazon says: “Martinkus has the courage to say what the mainstream press cannot” and “Rare insight into the realities of liberation and the limits of U.S. power.” There is no “Inside the Book,” no link to a publisher, and Barnes & Noble’s Web site didn’t even list the book.

So, somehow, Martinkus convinced the militants he was a “good guy?” He’s “on their side?” Ah, the power of the Internet!

Send rants and raves to Georganna at Writer’s Edge.