A colleague with a child heading off to college wanted to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid - the form better known as FAFSA - online. So he Googled FAFSA and then clicked on the link that showed up in the top spot on the search page.

It wasn't until he had nearly finished filling out the online application - complete with confidential information like Social Security numbers - that he realized he was not at the federal government's application site, but a site run by a private company - which now wanted to charge him money to file the "free" form.

Why did this happen? Savvy companies pay to place ads on the Google search results page, and employ various other tactics to ensure that their websites show up prominently. In this case, fafsa.com appeared in the top spot. The federal site, fafsa.ed.gov, was second.

So here's a quick reminder for all Google searches, not just those involving FAFSA: Take the time to scan the first page of results (I often go through the first two pages) to find the website you really want.

Pay special attention to domain names (the two or three letters that follow the "dot"). In the FAFSA instance, the .com was a giveaway that it was a commercial site; U.S. government sites end with .gov.