Inspired by this thread, do you find anything interesting when you Google yourself?
I have a [del]pretty[/del] really common name, especially for my region. When I try to find myself, the only thing I can turn up that are actually me are articles written for my college’s website when I was the captain of the rugby team there. If I were to have a prospective date Google me, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to find anything about me.
So, the question is, can you find anything about yourself when vanity googling? Feel free to share anything interesting you find about yourself or your tokio [probably spelled wrong, pronounced toe ki o, means “same name” in Spanish]. No need to give identifying details, of course.
I have an extremely unique name. Last time I googled myself I discovered that my ex-grad-advisor is now working at the University Of West Lettuce On The Left; he’d been my advisor in one of the top ten American universities for chemistry.
The article in which I’m a coauthor (in reality the material is 100% my research) is still his biggest achievement.
If you search only by lastname there’s two possibilities: mangling it, and getting millions of hits for people I’m not even related to AFAIK, or getting it right, in which case you get several pages’ worth of a cousin of mine. I haven’t tried googling the lastname only and seeing what page I show up in.
You mean “tocayo.”
Yeah. Someone with my first and last name who lives in my general geographic area is a competitive eater - so there are all these listings that are basically like “And *Word “The Stuffinator” Man * crammed 57 oysters in his mouth to break the record!!!”
When I saw that thread, I thought they were just plugging someone’s name into Google, so I tried it on me. First and last name, with and without a middle initial, with and without full middle name, it doesn’t matter what I try. I even tried adding the town I live near, the city I used to live in and some other information. I can’t find a single thing about me within the first ten pages of results on any of the searches. Unless there’s a trick to this, I suppose I can’t be found. I don’t think I have a common name, but there are other people in the world with the same name (even including middle name) and some of them are quite accomplished individuals.
My name is reasonably uncommon, but I’ve always been able to find others with the same first-name/last-name combination. For a while I was the best-known person as far as internet searches go, but for a few years now I’ve been beaten by a guy who is well enough known to have a Wikipedia article about him. (I’m not that well known, though I do have a long ago ex-girl-friend with a Wikipedia article).
I have an uncommon name too and if you google it with quotes all the results are me - mostly comments I’ve made on newsboards or reviews of DVDs from the rental service I use and a couple related to my job.
The first time I did a vanity Google, probably about 4-5 years ago, I got quite a shock.
I was implicated in an anti-Clinton invective … and yes, it really was ME they meant, much to my amazement. (My name IRL is the equivalent of John Smith, so one always has to be sure).
I was cited as a source in some over-the-top screed about how evil the Clintons are, because Mickey Kantor, the U.S. Trade Representative in the mid-1990s, was seated next to James Riady (seriously important Indonesian business guy) at a business luncheon in Indonesia. Yes, technically speaking no doubt I was the source of that earth-shattering information (since my job at the time involved figuring out which self-important poobah of business/government sat next to which other self-important poobah, and I would have answered honestly if someone asked me who sat next to whom). But to think that the seating arrangements at some stupid lunch proved that Bill and Hilary Clinton were secretly draining Indonesian coffers to fund left-wing activities in the US … well, it was beyond comical.
There’s a woman with my same first and last name (neither particularly common, though far from unique) who was a law professor in Hawaii who was an expert on the Holocaust – who’s now dead.
That actually led to a rumor that I was dead at one point, which kind of pissed me off.
My Amazon acct. is in my real name, so that’s the #1 hit, but most of them are to Holocaust Lady. Who’s dead.
Just the other day, while I was comparing Google and Cuil, I found myself referenced in a Wiki article (Google won, btw). I’m used to seeing my name on various sites that mention game reviews or some of the writing I’ve done for D&D products, but I was shocked as hell to see myself on Wikipedia.
According to Google, there’s only one other person with my name on the 'net, an Australian Barrister. All the results are either related to my site, or involve news reports of cases with which he was involved.
Using my real name, it’s pretty much impossible to find out anything about me on the Internet. Most of my online life is under an alias I used back when I was a teenager - that was when I wrote fan fics and was active in a handful of online communities. I no longer use that alias for anything, but it was a unique name so almost all the hits from it are about me.
It was easy to find me using my maiden name, and is now impossible to find me using my married name. I know there are at least 11 of me in my county alone who are registered to vote, and I think that number has grown quite a bit since the last time I checked.
When I tried this in high school and college I got a majority of the hits were of me and either football or track I just tried and I had one result in the first 5 pages, a very minor accomplishment while in college.
When my bro was about to turn 40, his co-workers googled his name. They found some perv 1000+ miles away who had been busted and the site had his namesake’s mugshot (in a bikini, with beard and chest hair, protruding if modest package). The crimes were more bizarre than skeevy, so naturally this got forwarded around his office along with queries about the best places to stay when vacationing there.
My maiden name is so unusual that, as far as I can find out, there is no living person using it in the United States. There is one man in Czechoslovakia and one in Fiji. Everyone else is dead or me.
With my married name, there’s a lot of hits; one is a real estate agent, one an artist, a small-town mayor, a lady who likes to contribute to political campaigns, a couple of authors and professors. Sorry to say nobody notorious.
My name is not common, and Googling found it in a really unlikely place. It was a website for some sort of Australian role-playing game, and one of the murderous cyborg villain characters had my exact name.
As far as I know it was pure coincidence. That website is no longer around.
Somebody with my same unusual first and last name is one of the country’s premier maker of custom golf clubs. Even more bizzarely, I know him tangientally; he’s from my small Texas hometown. He was a college golf champion when I was in elementary school.
I found out that I didn’t appear in the first 10 pages of search results. I am therefore a nonentity. I also found that I like it that way. In spite of my outspoken stance on numerous topics, I value my privacy. I guess you could say that I’m somewhat schizophrenic in that regard.
