Thursday 25 October 2007

Question: Have you ever Ego-Googled?

David McMahon posts an interesting question on his blog: Have you ever Googled yourself?

My answer to this: Certainly. I think that just about everyone who uses the internet frequently is overcome by the desire to find themselves in the vast realms of cyberspace. But for most people, the answer to the following question will be the same as mine:
Did you find anything?: No
Of course not all of us are famous, so we may not be within the first 30,000 odd pages of a Google search for our name. This really depends on how obscure your name is. When I Google my fake name which I sometimes use for dubious registration forms, I am at the top of the list. That is because nobody famous has that name. However, in a search for "David Webb", I'm nowhere.

What about you? Have you ever Googled yourself? If you want to answer this question, I encourage you to vote using the poll on the right hand side of this page. Next week we'll see how the votes fall - so keep posted!

Update: I have recieved a lot of feedback on this post, and everybody who has commented has pretty much the same story as me: they have Googled themselves, but they usually don't rank very high, if at all. This concludes the question - most people have Googled themseleves.

6 comments:

  1. I have googled myself and found my old postings on the "usenet newsgroups" from the pre-www days. In fact I sometimes google my name not to see it appear but rather to recollect some quote I had written in my usenet posts (but am not able to remember properly now and also am not able to easily find). The newsgroups are archived (and most are still functional) at http://groups.google.com and are a treasure-trove of knowledge/information.

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  2. hyderabad,

    Newsgroups certainly are a wealth of information, that's an interesting and entirely justifiable reason for googling yourself. Good to see that it's not just "ego-googling" we're talking about here - it can be put to good use.

    Cheers,

    David

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  3. I have done it before but there is a Will Smith movie with the central character that has my name. There are also a couple of other artists that are famous and take up several pages of the results. I'll never get up to their level.

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  4. I have googled myself and I must say I rank high and often - but I own many sites and have been at this for a long time!
    :)

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  5. Hi barbara,

    That's great that you can achieve a high google ranking - you must get a lot of traffic from google due to this. As your blog has a very unique name this would probably also help to be high on the list - the more generic, the more chance of somebody else ranking higher!

    Cheers,

    David

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for commenting. I will try to reply to every comment, so if you want to view the response you can come back to this post later. If you have a blogger account, you can also tick the "Email follow-up comments to....." box to have the reply emailed to you.

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