(inspired by Danny Sullivan’s LinkedIn Item)

Googling yourself is a real crapshoot. If you’re a “civilian” you may not find your name at all.

 Any kind of fame or notoriety produces dozens of hits. But then there is ambiguity. Google’s idiot LLM summaries can conflate you with other people who have the same name. How could you forget swimming the English channel or murdering three people with an ax? Not to mention your subsequent execution.

Or, like a friend from college, you can find you share a name with a porn star. As a teacher at the turn of the century, the first thing I did was show a PowerPoint slide detailing Who I am Not. Among others, I am not Madonna’s attorney or the editor of the Long Island Gay News, the priest, or the private detective. [1]

Since you are now always Googled before or just after meeting someone, Google yourself so you know what they will find, then do what I did and carry some cards listing the people you aren’t. Googling yourself is not just an exercise in narcissism—sometimes. Frequency counts.

There is a variation of this for authors. My friend and colleague Jerry Pournelle went on Amazon every day to check out the sales rankings of his books. It appeared he did this the way some people look at the stock market in the morning: not to make an investment, just to see how things were going. [2] There are 25,000 Jim Smiths, but, only 30 Paul Schindlers [3]on Google, stretching to the Broadway conductor and composer active between 1901 and 1921—unlikely to be mistaken for me by anyone who reads past the headline.

[1] When Googling someone, ambiguity is somewhat reduced with their middle initial or name, which is why assassins always have three names (Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, etc.). I am sure Lee Marvin Oswald is glad everyone knows the middle name of Kennedy’s assassin.

[2] He did think it was unfair that George R.R. Martin had Game Of Thrones on TV, a leap none of his books ever managed. I don’t know if he said it in public, but her certainly said it to me time and again.

[3] 32 on LinkedIn, 27, 167, and 126 on various other sites