Thread: Google yourself Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by starbelly (# 25) on :
 
Is it wrong to enjoy Googling yourself?

Is it wrong to Google yourself on a weekly basis?

I feel it is somehow incurious not to do this from time to time, but when I mentioned this at work I was looked at as if I was some abnormal ego-maniac.

The first thing I did when I first encountered a search engine was put my own name in. I googled myself just a moment ago, just because I could.

So, how often do Shipmates Google themselves?
 

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Posted by Bibaculus (# 18528) on :
 
I am lucky enough to have a very common name. I say lucky, because it makes me harder to trace on the Internet! Googling my name gives all sorts of people with the same name, but much more prominent than me - a distinguished Canadian academic, a chemistry professor, a musician of some sort. I don't appear at all, and I am very happy with that.
 

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Posted by Trudy Scrumptious (# 5647) on :
 
Because I use a hyphenated last name, it makes me fairly unique on the internet and I never come up with anyone but myself when I self-Google. I do it quite a bit for professional purposes, but it always feels icky, and a bit scary, as if I might discover that someone had posted a page saying horrible things about it. A bad review of one of my books is really the likeliest thing I'd ever find, because I can't imagine anyone caring enough to slander me personally ... but it's always kind of a weird experience. But impossible to resist the pull of curiosity.
 

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Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
My name is extremely common. There was a relatively famous Dutch sportsman in the eighties who had the same name, so that helps too. I don't have Facebook or LinkedIn, and I do most internet stuff under the name LeRoc. There are some work-related things with my name on the 'net, but they'll probably be somewhere around page 28 of the Google results.

The fact that I was already on the World Wide Web in 1989 means that I have the e-mail address [myfullname]@hotmail.com. I guess that's worth money

I get a lot of e-mails intended for other people who share the same name. One of them is the Regional President (or something like that) overseeing many countries for a large Evangelical church.

I get the e-mails from his mistress.
 

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Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :
 
I would have thought everyone has Googled themselves at least once.

I have quite a lot of interesting alter-ego's; a professor of physics at a US university, a steam train enthusiast, the guy who thinks the scientific establishment is against him because no one will take his perpetual-motion power generating machine seriously ...
 

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Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 

quote:

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Alan Cresswell: I have quite a lot of interesting alter-ego's; a professor of physics at a US university, a steam train enthusiast, the guy who thinks the scientific establishment is against him because no one will take his perpetual-motion power generating machine seriously ...

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quote:

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Originally posted by LeRoc:


I get a lot of e-mails intended for other people who share the same name. One of them is the Regional President (or something like that) overseeing many countries for a large Evangelical church.

I get the e-mails from his mistress.

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quote:

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Bibaculus: A less scrupulous person would see the potential for all sorts of fun and games there.

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I'm a saint
 

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Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :
 
I occasionally do, mainly to make sure that future fulltime employers (please please please!) don't find something weird. I do have enemies, though so far they haven't apparently thought of taking it online.

My name used to be unique, but as of last year I'm sharing it with a photo-addicted sex kitten. Oh well.
 

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Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :
 
or you are waiting for the right time.

There is a lab in the US named after me. And one or two academics with the same name as me.

But, of course, I don't google myself, I DuckDuckGo myself. Far healthier. It is worth doing because you can get a sense of whether your internet persona is a positive one or not. Bear in mind that when you are looking for a job, it is a few moments to look up your name, and the view that this gives can impact your prospects. All the pictures of you in drunken disarray can come back to haunt you.

I think it is actually slightly irresponsible not to check up on yourself occasionally. Every day might be considered too much, but once in a while is fine.
 

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Posted by leo (# 1458) on :
 
I do occasionally, just in case anything detrimental turns up.

I share a name with an American boxer so Google turns up various boxing matches and various church websites where I am due to preach.
 

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Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :
 
FirstName + LastName is not that uncommon and last time I looked, some years ago, I was running an animal sanctuary in California.

But just now I tried FirstFirstName + SecondFirstName + LastName and I see I was married in Indiana in 1811 and died (several times) in the last 150 years. But I don't seem to be active at the moment.
 

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Posted by Tubbs (# 440) on :
 
I've never done that! If I google first name + married name, there's nothing. It's a very common combination and there are loads of us.

If I google first name + maiden name, I appear fairly high up on the list. But only on LinkedIn and that's probably fine.

Gosh, how funny ... My best discovery was that I'm in the Buffyverse as a Slayer.

Tubbs

[ 11. February 2016, 15:41: Message edited by: Tubbs ]
 

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Posted by Bibaculus (# 18528) on :
 
I tried firstname + middlename + lastname and discovered I am a Jehovah's Witness.
 

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Posted by M. (# 3291) on :
 
I am a well-respected girl scout leader in Florida.

Actually, I appear quite a lot as I am company secretary of my employer's group companies.

M.

[ 11. February 2016, 17:02: Message edited by: M. ]
 

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Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :
 
Doing a Google image search of my full name, one of the pictures that came up is of Mr. Bean.
 

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Posted by Offeiriad (# 14031) on :
 
My Google persona is an eminent intestinal surgeon, world authority on the diagnostic qualities of farts!
 

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Posted by Eigon (# 4917) on :
 
I've found a maths teacher in Birmingham, a horsewoman, and a nurse - all roughly the same age as me, and all roughly from the same area.
 

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Posted by Landlubber (# 11055) on :
 
Sic transit gloria mundi (thus passes the glory of the world): last time I googled my name, I found myself immediately. I retired less than three years ago and this time, found only one article from 2001, in umpteen pages of results. I had no idea my name was so common. However, I found no particular famous namesake, just several obituaries, a marathon runner and my sister-in-law.
[added the end of a sentence]

[ 11. February 2016, 17:52: Message edited by: Landlubber ]
 

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Posted by Tree Bee (# 4033) on :
 
Interesting. There's one other person in the UK with my rather unusual maiden name according to google, about 10 years younger than me.
Several hits though for my married name ; several teachers and a schizophrenic comic book character!
 

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Posted by Banner Lady (# 10505) on :
 
Found only me: referenced in Facebook, Pinterest, Linked In and a slightly embarrassed shot of myself getting a diploma some years ago. All good so far....but am very glad I grew up in the age where all the stupid things I got up to never ended up in social media. I feel so sorry for my grandchildren!
 

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Posted by Jack the Lass (# 3415) on :
 
I'm still the first few entries when I google myself (which I'm sure has been really cheesing off Jack the Lass the Liverpool-based wedding photographer for several years), but in the few images they show in the general search none of the pictures are of me. One is however of Jackie Collins, which made me smile as my maiden name is vaguely similar to Collins and I did once get a job rejection letter addressed to Jackie Collins which made me and my then flatmates laugh a lot.

Other famous/infamous JtLs include a childhood education resource coordinator for a Dallas Baptist Church, and a (male) boxer who lost a boxing match in 1947 in Morecambe.

My brother-in-law shares a name with a UK minor league footballer turned well-oiled model. Any employer googling him might get a bit more than they bargain for.
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
I googled myself once. I was the first three hundred hits. (There is another Brenda Clough somewhere in Iowa, on a school board. She is married to a Barry Clough and has two children, Carson and Cody.) I decided I didn't need to worry about it any more.
 

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Posted by Bene Gesserit (# 14718) on :
 
Oh - I share my name with an actress who has quite a few mentions!

I come up once, at the bottom of the second page of results, in my work capacity and then again because of a talk I gave.
 

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Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
Last time I looked, I was a German porn star.
 

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Posted by RainbowGirl (# 18543) on :
 
Googling myself brings up a few memorial places bearing the same name, and a couple of authors, and then amusingly articles about my own work in animal rescue and articles about someone with an identical name who is in jail for animal cruelty offences.
 

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Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
Despite the relative unusualness of my name, there is at least one other, an extremely distinguished cancer nurse in Liverpool with many published papers to her name.

And I did discover a reference to a letter of mine in the Guardian by a very self-satisfied bunch of religious people who thought that their letter, also published, had demolished my arguments. I was unable to find the original anywhere, and they had not provided a link, unfortunately, so anyone finding their site would think they had. They hadn't. Unless you are totally convinced that every word of the opening to Romans cannot be argued with, and it's fair to treat some people as going to - well, I was posting that sort of thing long before I came here.
 

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Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :
 
If I google first name, middle name, surname, there is only me.

I am delighted to see that a bookseller on Abebooks is quoting a line from my thesis about a book written in 1908, to sell a copy of the said book.

If I google first name, middle initial, surname it's only me.

However, if I google just my first name and surname there are dozens of us. I share my name with an American on Pintrest who has the same first degree as me, likes the same colours as me, the same patterns of wall paper as me, and so on. In fact, apart from her fondness for high heeled shoes, almost all her pins appeal to me.
 

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Posted by starbelly (# 25) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Ariel:
Last time I looked, I was a German porn star.

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Last time I looked you were too.

Neil
 

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Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :
 
If I google first name surname it's only me. Google offers some misspellings as possible options. Duckduckgo found only me. The thing that I found interesting was a mention of something I'd forgotten doing: an article referring to something I set up with group in 1995, repeated in 2005, years after I'd moved away.

For a long time I appeared on the first page by googling my first name, but fortunately these days I don't appear until page 5. There are very good reasons I don't have a F*book account.
 

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Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :
 
I appear to be a whole pile of different doctors. So what do you think? Should I be the cardiologist, the OB/GYN or the GP?

Actually, I think I could be multiple cardiologists - I don't think it's all the same guy.
 

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Posted by Uncle Pete (# 10422) on :
 
I'm on Facebook. and one of the images is me at 15 or so, impersonating a football player (My Grade 11 school picture. Right next to Phillipine Duchesne, a saintly Catholic nun). Otherwise boooorinng. But about 20 years ago, and then about 13 years ago, I had brief moments in the sun, shared with an aspiring rock singer in the US, who seems to have disappeared, but has been replaced by a National Guard wingnut living in the Southern states of America. I think it was Louisiana. Last updated 2012.
 

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Posted by Cathscats (# 17827) on :
 
Never occurred to me to do that before! Glad to say I do not feature heavily, and there are no pictures of the real me (why is there of Nigel Farage?).
 

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Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :
 
I seem to have a doppelganger - it really is quite unnerving. We are both about equally present on the web but in different ways. Sometimes Google brings me up first and sometimes it brings her up first.

We are same forename and surname and share the same middle initial (although I think different middle names), we are a similar age, look vaguely similar, and enough of our interests overlap for it to be slightly spooky. Oh, she lives in San Francisco and I do not!

Jengie
 

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Posted by Graven Image (# 8755) on :
 
When I was working I did it every six months just to keep tabs on what was there. Some surprises now and then, all good. Now that I am retired I do not bother as I doubt there is anything new.
 

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Posted by Sandemaniac (# 12829) on :
 
I get an artist and a darts player. I turn up first at the bottom of the page in a lab web page made funny by the fact that everyone on it bar the boss has left, then one hit below that my Linkedin account.

AG

[ 11. February 2016, 21:01: Message edited by: Sandemaniac ]
 

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Posted by crunt (# 1321) on :
 
I haven't done it for a while (Googled myself), but a quick revisit shows me filling the first page of search results. It's not that I'm famous or anything, but I do have a very unusual last name and I have hyphenated my bog-standard first and middle names to stop people calling me "Steve". There's nothing wrong with Steve; it's just that I prefer Stephen, but it always gets shortened whether I like it or not. Since there are so many Steves in my age group, I always go by my last name, which is unusual to say the least.

I did a really bad thing once (tee-hee). My office mate, unbeknownst to him, shared firstname+lastname with a gay porn star. One day, as we were sitting at our respective desks at work, I brought the conversation around to Googling yourself (tee-hee) - and Bingo!

It took a while, but he forgave me eventually.
 

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Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :
 
I haven't googled my name for quite some time, but when I just did using my first, middle, and last names, there was only me. When I did first, middle initial, and last names, I appeared on page one. Also appearing on that page was a person who shared my birthday, just four years before mine, and who died this past May!

Using my first and last name, there is an actress (in a Star Wars movie!), and author, several teachers and real estate agents, but unless you count social media links, I did not appear at all on the first twenty pages.

IIRC, the first time I ever googled my name was because of a thread on the Ship.
 

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Posted by Kitten (# 1179) on :
 
Apparently I'm a writer of science fiction from California
 

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Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :
 
I share my rather unusual surname with a moderately famous theatre and film producer/director so the images bit comes up with him and a certain HMQ Elizabeth Windsor! No idea what she is doing there! I am referenced mainly about an angry article I once wrote about the way rent boys are ignored in some societies and thus get no properly targeted services. My one letter to the Grauniad predates the internet by many years so is not mentioned.
 

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Posted by Piglet (# 11803) on :
 
I too have a fairly unusual name, and Googling it revealed my entry on my work's web-site (with a picture), sundry references to Facebook (fair enough) and Goodreads (on which I have no recollection of ever posting) and a rather frivolous letter I wrote to the Telegraph 13 years ago.

I'm really not very exciting ...
 

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Posted by Graven Image (# 8755) on :
 
I just did a Google and found out that I died in September of last year. Scary part is the age is right.
 

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Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
I've done it now, instead of depending on memory. Duckduckgo has two recent Guardian letters. Google reveals the nurse has a PhD and in now in Manchester, misses one of the recent letters but has thrown up one from New Scientist, and things about veteran yews and how to use my GoTo telescope (useful, I'd forgotten the problems). Worryingly, it still refers to the directorship I had as a freeholder at the last place I lived, from some time ago, though that was resigned some time since. (And that was useful last time I did this, because it threw up that the resignation form had not been properly processed by Companies House, and I still had responsibilities back where I didn't want them!)
 

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Posted by Sipech (# 16870) on :
 
Apparently, I'm an Australian opera singer.

The really odd one though is that one of my namesakes is a divisional finance director whose boss (the group FD) was actually my group FD a couple of years ago.

I must admit I occasionally Google myself just to see if the real me has been mentioned, but I don't appear anywhere in the top few pages. It's not the most common of names, but the dozen or so others are much more noticeable on the web.
 

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Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :
 
... you have no idea ...
 

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Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by jedijudy:
IIRC, the first time I ever googled my name was because of a thread on the Ship.

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This certainly isn't the first time we've had a thread like this.

It wasn't that long ago that a Google on my name brought up Ship references on the first page, but no more. I'm still on the first page, but it's work related stuff, Facebook, Researchgate and my own website (not edited in over 10 years!) that come up for me.
 

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Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :
 
I had never heard of duckduckgo before-- I tried it and am disappointed to see that my ratemyprofessor page is in the first few hits. Bleh. One of the reasons I've googled myself is to hit all my professional links to push that one onto the 2nd page (fortunately, ratemyprofessor seems to be a passing phase-- no one goes there anymore).

My name is fairly common but a somewhat unusual spelling. I have a few... interesting... namesakes. One who writes spicy romance novels.
 

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Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
I generally use DDG now because it doesn't have the snags of Google - tax and data retention.
 

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Posted by Hedgehog (# 14125) on :
 
I prefer using duckduckgo too. But in any event, my first name, middle initial, last name is shared with an economist, who writes lots, talks at seminars and does such other things that, as a general rule, the first search result to actually be me is not until far down the second page. Which is how I prefer it!
 

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Posted by Nenya (# 16427) on :
 
*Giggles childishly at thread title*

There are a lot of authors with my first name and surname. Introduce my second name and there is no one... Except where the first and second names are reversed and then I seem to become more than one company director...
 

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Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
Years ago I used to get a transvestite Brazilian porn star, but she seems to have gone out of vogue.

Kelly Alves seems to be a hot millenial name in Brazil, though. On both Google and FB I get dozens of hits for cute 20- something girls.

[ 12. February 2016, 17:00: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
 

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Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
Transexual, I mean. Pre-op. It was pretty eye- opening.
 

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Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
Let me just declare officially that in Brazil, I've never been with a girl named Kelly Alves.
 

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Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
Well, get cracking, dude, there's a million of 'em.
 

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Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by LeRoc:
Let me just declare officially that in Brazil, I've never been with a girl named Kelly Alves.

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