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When I first met my shrink, I wasn’t so sure about him. He’s handsome, fit, not much taller than me, reticent. I couldn’t tell if his reticence was disapproval and judgment or if he was just doing his job: staying quiet, staying neutral. I’m new to therapy, and, frankly, had wanted a woman therapist, but here I was with this silent, unreadable man and I didn’t know how to feel comfy about it.

So I Googled him. I found his Facebook page, saw that he might be a band geek (like me), that he seems generally empathetic and that he has a cute dog that sometimes wears clothes.

That’s how I got comfortable.

A couple of weeks ago, Anna Fels wrote for the New York Times about patients Googling their therapists. Written from the perspective of a Googled therapist, the piece cautions against the ways in which knowing about your doctor’s personal life can affect the experience of therapy. She also acknowledged it happens in the other direction, too: ER nurses, for instance, are Googling their patients to find out if they’re criminals, or if they’re famous, or just if they’re anything interesting at all.

“The experience of evaluating a patient with fresh eyes and no prior assumptions may, for better and for worse, disappear,” Fels wrote.

I know that overGoogling can pose a problem for lots of people: Job seekers are legally entitled to a discrimination-free application process, for instance. And juries, too: We all know juries can’t (or shouldn’t) go Googling defendants. And what about the people out there who screwed up five years ago but their DUI or viral video or racist tweet is still the first thing that comes up? Are we not more than our search results?

We are. Still, I Google every single person I meet. Sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of curiosity. And I bet you, to some extent, do that, too. It’s a reflex now, and like a cliche of Internet culture: If I can access information, why wouldn’t I? But if you tell a person you Googled her, she’ll recoil a bit. (Trust me.) So, how come?

I talked to Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at UMass Dartmouth, and she agreed people-Googling still seems a little gauche. Barnes found in her report, “Reaching the Wired Generation: How Social Media is Changing College Admission,” that 21 percent of colleges and universities say they research and recruit students on social networks—especially students applying for prestigious scholarships or programs with high visibility and limited seats. This surprised people, she says.

“The interesting thing to me is that anyone’s surprised by this,” Barnes says. She says people didn’t expect that “academia would stoop so low.” “[It was like they thought academia] should be exempt from those kinds of activities,” she says. “People need to understand that we’re in a new era right now. That era is one of complete transparency: You can see and hear and watch what people do more than we ever could before.”

Does Barnes think the Era of Complete Transparency is a bad thing? “Some people think it’s good, some people think it’s bad,” she says. “For me, it’s just real.”

Which is why you’re basically behind the curve if you’re not Googling pretty much everyone you meet. The trend is not reserved for college admissions and doctors and nosy-parkers like me. There are startups in the service industry that capitalize this hunger for information, using it to help connect people with like-minded employees.

I talked to Lynn Perkins, CEO of Urban Sitter, a site that connects families with babysitters. Through Urban Sitter, both families and sitters create profiles using Facebook Connect, which pulls some of their Facebook info into an Urban Sitter profile. From there, profiles can be augmented with more info about why a sitter loves to sit or how many kids a family has and how old they are. There’s also a rating system within the site so that families can see how reliable or skilled sitters are, and sitters can see whether a family, say, burns through sitters quickly (a warning sign), or routinely comes home late.

“We try to give both sides a lot of information,” Perkins says. But even with that information, “both sitters and parents Google each other.” What are they looking for? The usual stuff: vulgar posts, criminal records, that kind of thing. But Perkins says she also noticed something else sitters in particular were trying to find: the occupations of the parents they’re sitting for.

“They’re looking to see where the parents work as a potential career connection,” Perkins says. “We’ve had numerous people find jobs through the parents they’ve met through the site. It’s super smart and motivated of the sitters.”

It is super smart. I’m for it. I’m for using the Internet as a teaching tool, a networking tool, a research tool. Why should we deny ourselves information?

Except I know that some people really do suffer from overzealous Googlers like me. Some of our histories are painful and our mistakes don’t (and shouldn’t) define us. Our grammar and spelling skills, our political alliances, whether we like Game of Thrones—those don’t necessarily determine whether we’re worth hiring or friending. I do not let that fact dissuade me from Googling, but I keep that in mind so that I can be a good Googler. A mindful Googler.

General advice for finding a good shrink is to shop around for a while, meet with a few people before you find a connection. I know people who’ve never found that connection. And while some details—taste in movies or music or authors or whether or not she’s a foodie—may not really be reliable for determining who might be a good doctor to you, there are things to be gleaned from the Web about the personality and style of a particular therapist that can, potentially, help you reach the right person.

Knowing what I know about my shrink helped me decide to pursue a relationship with him. What I found led me to believe I could talk to him openly about my most secret, most anxiety-fraught thoughts—and I was right. I don’t know how he would feel about the fact that I know he has a cute little dog, seems to live in a nice house, and maybe was involved in band in high school. But I hope he’d see that all those things signaled kindness to me. And that was all I was really looking for.