It's easy to mislead with the results that come up in Google searches.

Some even deliberately attempt to get databases populated with misinformation -- which may, for example, assist with messing up stalkers on the government dole or otherwise.

Hmmm, so any "furiner" that I want to prevent coming to the U.S. merely needs a Wikipedia page that chronicles their history as the "Johnny Appleseed" of the cannabis world. Along with their organization of violent protests against the establishment, and that little "misunderstanding" about what is "art" that was later overturned on a technicality.

And if they are turned away at the border once, it's almost impossible to get in later.

The frequency of incidence of a passenger being Google searched at an airport of entry into a country is not the same in Canada as in the US. Some kind of scenario approaching the one you are mentioning above would somewhat more reliably result in denial of entry to Canada.

Refine based on what? Why on earth would you answer any other questions for them?

Uh, maybe because you want to enter their country? Just maybe.

Bruce

TSA wants me to answer questions to enter their sterile area. Doesn't mean I do it.

Example
TSO: Where are you going today?
Me: Do you need help reading the boarding pass I just handed you?

You don't see the difference?

Immigration officials have considerably more power and responsibility than TSA clerks ever have or will have. I don't mess around with immigration officials in other countries -- and even in the U.S., which I have an absolute right to enter at any time, I treat immigration officials with the respect that they generally deserve. They are nothing like the TSA clerks. I hate to even refer to them in the same sentence.

Bruce

Nope, there is absolutely zero difference. I will show them my identification, but government in any form has no business knowing what my business is.

Let me try one more time: A visitor to another country can be denied entry for a variety of reasons and it is the business of that country's immigration officials to determine that the visitor is eligible to enter the country. If the visitor does not wish to answer questions necessary to establish his eligibility to be admitted to the foreign country, he need not be admitted.

A citizen returning to his own country has no duty or obligation to answer such questions.

I agree with respect to our own (U.S.) government. But if I want to enter, say, Mongolia (which I entered in May), I'm not surprised when the Mongolians want to know what I'm going to do there.

Bruce

You'd be surprised how much you can say without actually divulging much of anything.

+1 This is so stupid, its scary. Why on earth would anybody think that this would work even a little bit?

Jennifer Williams? Andreas Schmidt? Juan Lopez? Wang Wei (or is that Wei Wang)? Sunil Gupta? Park Seo Yoon?

How would a Canada-cop have way of figuring out which of the of (1 - 5 million) hits for each of these names has anything to do with the person in question. In fact, given such common names, it's almost guaranteed that someone with that name will be googlably notorious for something unsavory.

What about language? Could some random Canada-cop even correctly enter any of the last three into google using an English/French keyboard and hope to get meaningful results from China, India and Korea, respectively?

Moreover, although English is indeed the international language of business and science, that doesn't mean that citizens (even English speaking ones) of Germany, Japan, Brazil (umm well like most countries, actually) feel obliged to produce English or French web content for the delectation of Canada border control.

Making it even more complicated, in many languages and cultures, the name that someone uses can vary by context: People may use a nickanme in all but the most formal contexts. In some cultures, it is common for women use their maiden name professionally. Carefully looking up "Catherine Elizabeth Smith" is unlikely to find someone who's always called "Cathy Smith", except at work, where she's "Cathy Jones or Cathy Jones-Smith". In some cultures, the given + surname construction is much more flexible, with a mix of patrynomic and other identifiers used. In some Eastern cultures, changing a name (say after a period of bad health) is not uncommon.

So IOW, via Page Rank, you have a foolproof method for catching the stupid criminals, terrorists, and liars.

Google doesn't have "invasive databases." It's a search engine that finds information that's already out on the Web, usually put there by the person themselves. A typical Google search of an average professional would return pages/profiles from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other opt-in services.

My guess -- purely a guess -- is that Google searching someone is more likely to speed them along than to detain them. If they find your profile in LinkedIn and see right away that you're a well known professional in your field, they hurry you on your way. If they can't find you (and it's easy to tell if the John Smith on the screen is the John Smith whose passport they are looking at) then they fall back to their old school processes. It's remarkably difficult to fake LinkedIn and Facebook profiles that appear credible and have the 100+ connections that most people tend to have.

The information is already public. I don't see this is a big deal.

Side note: it's very funny to me to see multiple people on this thread talking the talk of "Google expert" when they clearly know very little about the technology.