An Associated Press article says searching Google for information about your date is an increasingly common and practical thing to do.
Dating used to be largely a matter of spending time with a love interest, discovering the good, the bad and the ugly in person. If you were lucky, friends helped fill in some of the blanks.
These days, the Internet -- and the ability to check people out before they ever meet up -- has forever changed the rules.
For better or worse, "googling" your date has become standard practice.
"I often tell my friends that are still in the dating sphere to use the power of Google to their advantage," says Katie Laird, a 24-year-old Web marketing professional and self-proclaimed "social software geek" from Houston.
It's easy to do you just plunk your date's name into Google. However, sometimes you might find out something weird about your date. The article says people have found out their dates are into bizarre fetishes like vampires. A web search may also reveal photos or someone's real age. The worst results may be "mistaken identity" situations when a person finds information they think is about their date but it is really about another person with the same name.
