Googling my real name turns up nothing about me, but it turns up a lot about a politician whose name is very similar to mine.
Googling myself under various internet IDs turns up a lot of stuff, but most of it not about me specifically. Rather it’s relating to material I’ve contributed to various fora, mostly Wikipedia. There used to be a blog post out there that slagged me for getting some non-notable actor’s article removed from Wikipedia but it seems to have vanished. Too bad. The guy was a total jerk and I liked having the evidence of what a monomaniacal asshole he was out there for the world to see.
I once found out that someone with my name (same short-form name anyway) died on the East Coast. I’m guessing he killed himself, in fact, based on where the family wants donations to go.
Quite an attention-grabber when you’re just looking for some old Usenet posts.
Googling my real name gets you a Californian comp sci professor, an Australian newscaster, and a bunch of dead Scottish people. I used to turn up for having played Romeo in a small local production of R&J a few years back, but everything about that has vanished into the aether.
Searching my most common online alias turns up a bunch of 80s-band references, for whatever reason.
What I have found recently is that there is now an actress with my name. She has been in just two indie movies, but that has completely diluted the google results for me and others with the same name. I used to pop up on the first or second page, but as approximately 75% of the links are movie related, I have been relegated to one listing on page 8, and one pic of my Boardgamegeek avatar on page 7 of images.
My soon-to-be married name is very rare as a PERSON, but apparently swapping first and last names turns me into a location in the UK.
My name isn’t quite so common, but it’s not unusual either, so googling my real name comes up with a lot of people who aren’t me, plus a lot of blog posts that are me.
Googling my nick comes up with a crapload of things that have nothing to do with me, and except for the Prodigy song of almost the same name (theirs is plural, and I didn’t get my nick from their song – I didn’t even know of them back then) I’m pretty sure my nick predates them all.
There are only about a half-dozen people in the country who share my full name – it’s pretty unusual. If you Google it, 95% of the hits are for me, mostly pertaining to my professional work in the video games industry.
The other 5% are for a gay porn star who shares my name. :smack:
The top ten hits start with a Wikipedia article about a former priest, follow up with two references to me, then include an attorney, a guy born in 1830 listed on a genealogy site, a musician with a middle and last name match my first and last name, and finally a link to my LinkedIn profile.
I have a very unique last name; when vanity searching, I get a couple of legit news articles about me, a bunch of geneology stuff (not me, surprisingly), and one picture that I wish didn’t exist.
(The picture is just a bad picture, not dirty. When I was a kid, Mom took a picture of me with my collection of certain character-themed items and submitted it to a fan club website. I looked hideous.)
That was interesting. This was the first time I did a search including mymiddle name and there was only 1 hit which is me. My wife’s local university alumni association put up an announcement of our wedding including a picture of us and of the alumni members that were at the wedding. The only problem is I can’t read it, it’s all in Chinese except for my name, the name of the officiant and the hotel where the ceremony/reception was. Any dopers who can read chinese want to translate for me? Wedding Announcement
I know that give’s away my anonymity here but I’m low-key and haven’t pissed anyone off that I know of so I’m not too worried.
On a usual search without the middle name my name is still uncommon. Over half are of a fellow Canadian about my age who’s very big in para-skiing and snowboarding. He actually friended me on facebook. There’s only a couple odd links that are me although it appears the third link is to my facebook page.
I have a mostly uncommon name. Recently I did a search on my name. Turns out I’m the 7th grade student of the month at an elementry school in North Carolina.
My first name plus surname is unique within the U.K., but there seem to be a fair few of me in the U.S. Beyond that, I can see articles I’ve written on one site appearing on other sites. The SDMB is not the only messageboard that gets ripped off.
The first time I plugged my first & last name into google several years ago, I was shocked to find that someone with my name was being covered extensively in the press for being the first person to sue his medical insurance for not covering prescriptions for a famous erectile disfunction drug. It’s no longer the first thing that google returns, but its still on the first page. Luckily, none of my old college friends have ever discovered this.
I’m a lab tech and I worked in a neurological science lab. When I googled my name I found a woman with my name working in a neurological science lab as a lab tech. And it wasn’t me.
I found an assignment I wrote in my College Sci Fi class 6 years ago arguing that in Alien the creatures in the pods weren’t the same species that piloted the ship and were in fact a biological weapon.
Apparently there is a lawyer with my name in Atlanta.
I found my cousins racket ball stats listeded in a Australian University website.
I apparently have the same name as a now-deceased Olympic swimming coach, but that’s about the limit of anything that might be interesting.
My only presence on the 'Net, other than this board and a Myspace page that I do very little with, appears to be some photos of railroading and of helicopters scattered around various sites, and some records of correspondence concerning UFOs on a long-defunct Area 51-related web site.
BTW, to all who are curious … you should try googling your screen name sometime.
Googling “CairoCarol” turns up a number of people besides me (everyone named Carol who ever took a vacation in Egypt adopted that as a moniker, apparently) but I also found that:
A company offers a photo I took for free download as a cell-phone wallpaper
A photo of mine is available on Wikimedia
Some comments I made on the Dope have been transferred to another site that clearly uses some kind of web crawler searching for key words, then assembles whatever it finds on the other site - it’s kind of weird, but it serves as a valuable reminder that what you say on the Internet lasts forever and is not private.
As to the photos being available, that’s fine … I had put them up on Flickr and they were licensed for use through Creative Commons. I’m actually kind of flattered that out of all the noise on the worldwide web, someone still noticed my photography and thought it was worth using.
Thanks to all the replies, and just to clarify to those that have seen my recent post in the inspiring thread, I was truly interested in what other people could find about themselves. It’s kind of neat, and pretty fun. I have Googled my screen name (not this one, but Pygmy Rugger) and was surprised to find a few posts I wrote under that pseudo. Good call, CairoCarol.
I have a pretty rare name, I guess. The only other live person I can find with my name is a black man in an African government position. Since I am a white-bread white American woman and my name doesn’t sound at all African, I find that sort of surprising. If I add in my maiden name as a middle name in the way I sign myself, I’m the only one.
Googling dangermom brings up someone who writes Star Trek fanfiction. Please note that that dangermom is not me.
There’s an Irish professor-me out there at the University of Ulster who keeps writing books on violent societies and culture and creativity (I think). I should keep up on what not-me is penning these days.
I’m also a registered massage therapist in Picton, Ontario.
