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Yes, I make a habit of Googling myself every so often. "Ego-searching," I've heard it called. There seems to be a lot of me on the web---the bulk of it connected with my Internet Fan Fiction period, but I can usually thin that out by subtracting the title of the series I fan-fictioned.
Other things pop up besides reference to my Internet Fan Fiction...e-mails on sites I've written to...old fan letters in SF magazines...book reviews on Amazon.com...an article for Kathleen's Workshop...and things I've posted right here at Hatrack River.
A surprising amount pops up in different contexts. I guess a lot of people set up scans of the Internet and filch things. References to my Amazon.com reviews pop up on at least three different sites.
For the last year or so, the number of items (which Google won't display unless you ask them to) had hovered around one thousand. Now it's risen to twenty-eight hundred. I haven't been more active...they must have scanned a few more things.
Is it all me? In all of about two cases, yes. The others pop up in a geneological page, and a British pub licence I never applied for. (A misspelled name? Possibly.)
I seem to have left a lot of footprints in the Internet sands. Will it last? Who knows...and, except for me, who cares?
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Considering I make it a rule not to use my proper name online (I usually have a screen name or use my nickname), I find it hard to find myself. I come across the two or three places where I was listed on a website because of something at work or school. All the rest are people who share my name, and (I mean this) about 90% of them are dead people listed on genealogical websites. My name must have gone out of fashion.
Posts: 470 | Registered: Nov 2005
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I did this fairly recently, just on a lark. I don't have anything published, so I knew I wouldn't find anything on myself. I just wanted to see what would come up. I have a fairly common name, though. John Lewis.
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I get over a million hits. I have a rather common name, particularly online. There are a lot of Chiu's in this world.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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My blog is jamieford.com, so I pop right up. The interesting thing about owning my own domain name is that I get emails from all the other Jamie Fords out there--after they've googled themselves and found me. They've all been quite cordial.
Posts: 603 | Registered: Jan 2006
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My married name has two links- both me. My full legal name has no hits (first name, middle name, maiden name, last name). My first name and maiden name have 12 hits- all me. If I add my middle name, none. If I just search my first name, 1860.
edit to add- forgot that for work everything is under initials and last name so there should be more of me out there.
[This message has been edited by sholar (edited August 29, 2006).]
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With an unusual name, I get just my stuff. About 10 pages. Interesting that a technical book I wrote back in the early 80's is still listed for sale various places. My website and blog are at the top of the list. Posts: 153 | Registered: Jan 2006
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I'm nobody, nor do I have anything published, so there's really no reason for me to do it. Still, I guess it's fun to see who bears the same monkier.
A basketball player, a New Orleans burlesque performer(a woman of all things), an actor, a candidate for Congress.
I've a terribly common name though. In 6th and 7th grade I rode the bus with another Chris Owens. His mother came to pick him up from school, they called me instead.
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I expected to find nothing besides my MySpace and blog, but I found some articles about two of the plays I was in while attending highschool, which was a nostalgic little surprise.
Posts: 114 | Registered: Jun 2005
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I've googled my name several times. According to the Internet, I do not exist. Apparently no one besides my parents thought it necessary to inflict my name on any other child in the world.
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My last name also happens to be the name of a city, so I'll find lots of "FirstName's LastName links" or photographs or whatever. (Google strips the apostrophe-"s".) I can't think of any way to sort through it except manually.
I find stuff on the Boehm conservative garbage collector, rotating postgresql log files, a quantum computing research paper, an image processing research paper, a couple of Quake 3 modifications, IEEE membership rolls, a patch to the Linux kernel, something on the x.org i810 video driver, a video game high score list, a forum post about adding custom immutable types to Java, some reference-counting stuff on a Python mailing list, a post about calculating gradients of functions of complex matrices...
By far, the most popular topic is one of my Quake 3 mods. Sweet.
Also sweet: it looks like I've never put my name on something totally stupid. I've done totally stupid online, but never put my name on it.
I wonder if it's possible to use Google's search API to find a person based on the topics of pages you might find him on. I mean, could someone take one of these lists and find out who one of us is?
I recently found that one other person in the world shares my name. From what I read of his politics, I don't like him at all.
[This message has been edited by trousercuit (edited August 30, 2006).]
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I have an unusually spelled name (blessing or curse, like so much else in my life, take your pick). So I can make an assumption that it's me when my name comes up, unless I know it not to be.
However, it takes finesse. I have to put "Robert Nowall" in "quotation marks." If I don't, I get millions of references to "Now All" or "No Wall," and usually have to go three or four pages in to get to a single definitely-me reference.
Some oddities abound. I've run across this page that comes across as gibberish, but which I believe is my computer's attempt to represent Korean---but which my name, in Roman letters, is plainly visible. I believe it's originally an editorial from Amazing by Silverberg in the mid-eighties [and originally in English, of course], that mentioned me by name...but my attempts to translate it failed.
And I don't limit myself to Google. Try Alltheweb, too. It seems everybody's search engine is just a little different and has different stuff...
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There are a few of me. But none of them are me. I have fiddled my pen name a bit so that I don't get hits for it on Google. I feel free about changing to a pen name, but a little less so if it were someone's real name.
Posts: 334 | Registered: Sep 2003
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I popped up a few times, for articles I have published! I have printed them out in color to keep for my portfolio. This makes a nice contribution when sending querys, (or so I think). Any ideas on this?
Posts: 26 | Registered: Aug 2006
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Robert, one thing that will drive up the number of hits you get is this: there are robots that search on key words, and then build pages of links to related Web pages. Their point isn't to really _be_ a resource, of course, but to appear to Google as if they were nexuses (nexi?) of activity, which increases the likelihood that Google will rank them higher, which increases the number of people arriving at that page via Google -- which increases their ad revenue. It's a form of spam.
One of my pages ranks high for "solipsism", another is #1 right now for "philosophy of the soul", and several documents I've republished (i.e., they're not mine, but I publish them in a more readable form than plain text, e.g., St. Justin's apologies) rank high for certain key phrases. All of them show up in this form of spam.
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Alas that these search engines and associated technologies are not disinterested surveyors of the Interent but commercial enterprises. Several of those type of pages do pop up on my egosearching, obviously scanned from other pages I directly contributed to in some way. I had not considered them a form of spam before.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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It took something a bit stronger than Googling myself, but I discovered a (now former) friend of mine used two versions of my name as aliases during her crime spree days.
Posts: 90 | Registered: Aug 2006
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