That does sound disturbing. I think that’s another level from what the OP was asking about, though. A simple google search and limited poking around based on that is okay in my book. Cyber-stalking, not so much.
I generally try to google most of my dates. Sometimes I get slapped, but sometimes they are in to it…
Not only is it healthy, it can result in naked pictures. What’s not to like?
As for what you’ll find out and dumping potentials because of it, I think we’ll work that out, too. Divorce used to have much more stigma than it does now; I think people will figure out that a guy who had a flamewar once is still probably capable of being a decent human being.
I find googling someone you just met to be a little paranoid. Personally, I would wait until they said something that made me suspicious before I went searching.
For instance, back in the wilds of 1997, I was talking to a guy online and he started making sort of fishy claims about himself, one of which was that he was a starting player on his college’s baseball team, which clashed with other statements he’d made before about his hatred of sports and such. So, I searched for the school’s web site and tried to get a baseball roster, which they didn’t have posted so I never did find out if he was lying or what. But that search was warranted, in my opinion, whereas looking up everyone you’re thinking of dating seems way too suspicious and untrusting.
I don’t google on the first date. I might if the relationship progresses to a certain point, or I might not. It just seems too nosy to me. I feel fairly safe with that choice, because what I will do is look them up on the public records website, and as Rascal’s Mom says, it lets me know if they’ve ever had so much as a parking ticket.
One time it really paid off- I met this local when I was touristing in Tombstone, and he started calling me and we made plans, and we got together for dinner along with my friend that I had come along with me. I asked him some basic questions, just chitchat, like had he ever been married (he said once 20 years ago and single since), his birthday, etc. The next day I looked him up in the court system and found that he was ten years older than he claimed, that he got married 3 years ago, and that he had a court date coming up for domestic violence and stalking. That was creepy.
Fair enough. Other than that singular experience, I can’t say that I’ve had much experience with people who aren’t family or old acquaintances googling me. Or vice versa, since I haven’t had much call to look anyone up. 
In any event, I politely and promptly lost his contact information.
Not dating, but still a pretty serious relationship…
I had an interview with an agent whose name is very unique. I googled him, same as I would google any other potential employer.
He’s got a PhD in physics (which he’d gotten recently, so while working) and two outstanding parking tickets. By finding out that information, I knew he’d be a hyperactive nerd before getting to the interview
He’s now my agent.
I would feel kind of weird looking for legal type information, but then I’m not sure how to do that anyway. I would google someone just out of curiosity though, not with the aim of discovering bad things about them. Of course I meet half of my dates through various social websites anyway…
Guys - do you take seriously girls you end up googling on the first date? 
I’ve stalked a few people on Facebook before, for various reasons. I think most people my age have. As long as you take what you see with a grain of salt, I don’t see anything unhealthy about it.
I haven’t had many girls let me google them on the first date, to be honest. But, regarding the last one that did, we stayed together for two years and although (strictly speaking) we broke up almost a year ago, we have only fairly recently decided that we really need to stop googling each other. At the moment, I only really google myself…
Even 30 years ago, the men she would meet would be friends of friends or friends of friends of friends, and come slightly pre-screened. Social circles would have dropped anyone truly horrible or gossip around the group would let her know that “Bill is charming, but he’s an ass. Stay away from him.”
Online or at a bar? Only screens out those who are unable to locate a computer or find an id card.
I Googled a prospective date because she was a fine-arts photographer. Her website had several nude self-portraits. That’s certainly more background that you can reasonably expect.
I also looked up a woman who made documentaries, and all of her work referred to her being a lesbian (I’m male). She was upfront about it on the date, but it was a good piece of information to have in advance.
Looking back, I’ve only done this when a person is in the arts and I’m curious about their work. I’m not that interested in someone’s message-board ramblings, frankly. I assume the vast bulk of that stuff is anonymous anyway. And I’m in my forties – not many of my peers have a Facebook profile, and fewer still feature drunken photos.
I’m hard to fine online because nobody spells my name right, and you have to wade through pages of German middle-school athletic results to weed out those few websites that I’m mentioned on by name.
See, that in and of itself is all the information I need to get the 24 hour flu bug.
I hope no prospective ever googles me, as there’s a guy with the same name as me who is convinced that the CIA are beaming microwaves into his nads, which makes him impotent, so he coats himself with tinfoil.
But to immediately leap to online research leapfrogs well past “casual acquaintance filtering” and into “private detective” territory. Your dad could never have got this amount of information; google is overkill.
And as I said, I understand the notion of looking up someone’s legal history; that’s only sense. The Internet is a big city, not a small town, and the Police Report pages pile up too fast for any one person to read. Searching them for previous divorces and crimes is a good idea, in the same way you’d ask your friends (or your friendly neighborhood cop). But trying to hunt down every detail of every letter they wrote for the last 15 years would be just creepy; I don’t see a significant difference between that and the Internet.
Maybe what Match.com needs is a rating system like eBay: if you meet up with someone, but you don’t hit it off, you can leave your name on his profile: essentially nothing more than a notice reading “I met with this member and I’ll tell you what I think if you send me an email.”
It hink it’s perfectly “healthy” to plug your date’s name into Google. There are potentially unhealthy ways to use the information you turn up, but there are potentially healthy ways as well.
To be honest, I started Googling yourself: Find Anything Interesting as a bit of a social experiment. While I understand the desire to look up a date via google, the vast majority of respondents to that thread, like mine, were, “I found a couple unique things about myself, plus some famous person that did X.” Although the thread is less than a day old, almost all the responses were that most of the results weren’t them, or came up with an obscure (but interesting) detail about their past.
My point is, when you Google a date, how do you know that it’s the date you’re Googling? How can it be a useful tool, if you’re asking, “Have any John Smiths raped and murdered 12 joggers after meeting them on MySpace?”, when you don’t even know if it’s the John Smith you’re about to meet, his cousin, or somebody in a country you’ve never even heard of?
Context is important, sure, as is commonness of name. I don’t think “John Smith” would be worth googling. Jacob Duncan Lyndenbourg III, though, will probably be your guy.
I google people for my mother’s principal all the time. She’s not interested in hiring a private eye, what she wants to know is if a potential hire has incriminating photos or shows a history of severe lack of judgment that a sixth grader (or his parents) are likely to find in a casual internet search. So I look on google and MySpace and Facebook. How do I know if it’s a false positive? Usually it’s obvious - they’re from another state, went to a different college, or have a picture that is of a different person.
I understand where you’re coming from, WhyNot, but that seems like it’s a bit of a different situation. By rights, your mother’s principal should be using Pinkerton. Even though I’m going through an exhaustive investigation to obtain a government clearance, Pinkerton was a quick, down and dirty investigative system that allowed me to work with non classified confidential data.
I just can’t imagine googling a potential date and finding that they’re wanted in four states for grand theft auto (hyperbole, I know). This might be the racist coming out in me, but from my experience, those predisposed to committing crimes that are going to show up on a cursory search tend to have common names. Then again, I come from a heavily Hispanic populated area.