Late Night Googling

[onefixedstar]

I'm supposed to be engaged in coding interviews right now, so instead I ran a Google search on myself and all of my siblings. We have what appears to be (from my North American vantage point) a not-uncommon Japanese surname that becomes highly unusual when paired with our (extremely common) European given names. This has the advantage of ensuring that we'll never be hit with bills that actually belong to someone else, or be kept off a plane because our name closely resembles the name of someone on the no-fly list. It has the disadvantage of making us exceptionally easy to stalk, if someone were so inclined, and of making it impossible to pretend that the name on the no-fly list really refers to someone else. And finally, it means that we do ego searches on Google, every hit actually refers to us.

semiotic_trader got the most hits with 34. Many of these were academic, including one that looked like his newly published article (yay!), although I'm not sure because the link didn't work. The rest were mainly leftover articles from his days as a university reporter and news editor, floating in various archives on the web, which is often not as ephemeral as we think.

I had the second largest number of hits with 22. Most of these were also academic, although there was one hit leftover from a second year co-op job. There's a lot of university service stuff, a couple of conference references, and my profile for the collaborative program I'm enrolled in. [Nothing, however, from my home department, which has yet to get around to putting grad student info on their badly outdated website, much to the frustration of myself, the department computer committee, and presumably a whole host of universities looking for promising new graduates to hire ;)] I also get three hits with Google Images that actually lead to pictures of me. That's kind of scary. Although, again, unusual name combination = easy stalking. Which is one of the reasons I rarely use my real name when I participate online. (There are lots more pictures of me floating out on the web on websites belonging to various friends, but they typically label the pictures only with my excessively popular first name, so it's not really a problem.)

steninja had two hits, both from the meeting minutes of a club she belonged to in first year.

The non-LJ sibling with no appropriate nickname got one hit, from an assignment he did as an undergraduate.

reiber has nothing, because he's apparently even more paranoid about putting his real name out there than I am.

Comments

[a-just-society.livejournal.com]

What, no searching for the in-laws? Ego-surfing is like crack, and I do it far too often. I started outstripping semiotic_trader a few years ago, when my academic work started popping up online, and his articles started disappearing. I also have a fairly rare name, but there appears to be a Conservative of some sort in the UK with my name, and someone who has been in a play or something...

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

I thought about searching for you, but I didn't know your name was so uncommon. Next time, you're on the list! :D

[reiber.livejournal.com]

It's not that I'm paranoid about posting my real name, it's that I have nothing to post it on. As you pointed out, most of the hits from you and semiotic_trader were academic, and those I'm sure, are exclusively post-secondary academic. I have very little post-secondary education, and from an institution that doesn't really have any gall when it comes to publishing things for the public. I use my real name for all sorts of things I sign up for, but they are usually forums that have good enough Privacy Policies as to not let my real name escape.

I used to have one hit from a friend's website, but I ended up taking my profile off because I never did anything on the site. I think the site may no longer exist, and if it does exist, it shouldn't.

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

You do have a point there, yes. If you're not writing for newspapers, writing for conferences, or joining clubs with websites, there really wouldn't be much reason for you to be out there. I guess that explains why I find so few people from high school when I search...