Katie Lee writes...A certain well-known broadsheet journalist once sent me an email that started "I accidentally typed my name into Google and..." at which point I branded her a shameless fibber and chuckled at the ludicrousness of such a claim. You accidentally typed your name into Google? What, you tripped and fell on the keyboard, miraculously spelling out your own name with your buttocks? You nodded off in front of your monitor and when you woke up you found you'd sleep-googled?! It seemed like such an outrageous - and, what's more, unnecessary - lie to tell a person. Surely, there's no shame in Googling yourself, is there?
Until that moment, it hadn't really occurred to me that I should keep any self-Googling habits quiet. After all, if I hadn't Googled myself I wouldn't know that I'm a famous ice-skater, a folk singer who loved Glen Canyon, and the child-bride of Billy Joel. And it's not like I've only ever Googled myself - I've Googled pretty much all my friends to see what pops up, and we have a running competition in the office to see who has the least attractive namesake in Google images. We all find ourselves endlessly fascinating, and it turns out that we find anyone who shares our name endlessly fascinating as well.
But this innocent pastime seemed perfectly harmless (if a little narcissistic) until recently. So what changed? Well, on the advice of a more efficient friend, I created a Google Alert for my name. It seemed like an easier way of tracking any mentions of Shiny Media in the press, and (of course) I had to grudgingly confess a desire to know if anyone out there was talking about me, and if what they were saying was nice or not.
But it hasn't quite worked out as I'd hoped. Now the first thing that my BlackBerry greets me with in the morning is an email listing all the things that the Katie Lees of the world have been doing with themselves. I feature fairly regularly, thanks to this website (I'm feeling *pretty* confident that this column will get pinged in my direction due to the constant self-referencing), but it's not anywhere near as much as my ego would like. Plus, you can bet your bottom Euro that whatever the other Katie Lees out there are doing, it's nearly always a sight more interesting than whatever I've cooked up that week.
There's nothing quite so depressing as discovering that your namesake ripped a 3 home run in last night's game (which I'm guessing is a good thing), rode through her home town naked on a bicycle, (can't find the link but it's true, honest) and once delivered post in her wedding dress (ditto). Clearly all other Katie Lees out there are entirely loopy (especially the one who married Billy Joel - she must have that bloody River of Dreams song stuck permanently on her Internal Jukebox) and they're putting me to shame with their daft antics or over-achieving ways.
But it's probably the very least I deserve. Basically Google is punishing me for my vanity. It's happy to tell me if and when people mention me, but it sandwiches the information in between the achievements of far more worthy and interesting namesakes, ensuring that not only do I feel vain and self-regarding, but I also feel a little bit jealous of all the other Katie Lees in this world. Apart from the one married to Mr Annoying Songs, of course.
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I see no shame in it at all. Someone with the same name as me died of mad cow's desiese, and another is a brain surgeon!
Kick on!
Utterly irrelevant, but a 3-run home run is a big deal; a 4-run home run would be a grand slam, and the largest score you can ever rack up on a single batter. So congrats! Apparently you're very good in the clutch!
I got an email from someone asking if I had gone to her high school (no); she had found me through Google which prompted me to find out what else was coming up. I see now it's becoming fairly standard job-search advice to Google yourself to find out what an employer might see (though I don't know exactly what that would accomplish on either end).
Talking about it so much makes me want to go look right now! I wonder if my namesake is still producing paintings of gorillas?
My last name is also a present tense verb - bares. So, if you google me, you get pages and pages of porn in the vein of "Sarah bares it all!" and you'll find one of two things that pertain to the actual me, and also a woman with my name who runs a brewery in Illinois.
ive got a barrister, mortgage advisor, doctor and someone who enjoys shark hunting sharing my name. i was recently discussing in work how i google my "internet handle" the name i use online (no its not tezze before you go looking!) and it brings up every forum post ive made in the last 4/5 years and every profile/myspace ive ever made, its really quite detailed and scary.
I think this ties in well with the post Susi made the other day about google "owning" the internet and how anything and everything can be discovered from that little text box, its scary and very much a big brother society to quote the massively overused phrase but by posting online we give up our right to privacy and allow everything to enter the archives of the internet, where it will remail until someone pulls the plug.
anyway, no. its not strange to google yourself but it is annoying to find someones already registered firstnamelastname.com before you.
I wish my name wasn't so uncommon. I seem to be the only person in the world that has my name, and what makes this problematic is when well-meaning family members decide to post family trees, without my consent.
I don't think it's wrong to Google yourself. In fact, it's something I do every few months myself, and have been doing it since pre-Google days. I'm pleased to say there is nothing about me in the top 20 pages when searching for my own name (can't be bothered looking any deeper than that!). My name is common (no, not John Smith).
Yahoo! was the big search engine around about the time I was due to leave university (1997). I, like many of my fellow IT students, had placed my CV on my own personal website. I understood search engines and had been careful - I hadn't submitted my website to Yahoo! and I was sure no one I knew linked to my pages. I was a little shocked, therefore, to find my CV appearing in the top couple of pages when searching for my name, with my home address and telephone number on full view! It turns out my ISP had a page linking to all of their customer's homepages, and Yahoo!'s web crawler had traversed its way across this page and all of mine. I didn't feel comfortable with that and immediately moved the CV page to its own directory with no link to it from my main page. It took a couple of months for it to disappear from Yahoo!'s index.
I do understand that it is worthwhile for many people to have their name appear at the top of Google's rankings. Just be careful with personal details. Google is certainly a useful tool for tracing some of your own net activity. Just remember that others can use it for the same purpose too!