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Googling Oneself
It's become something of a pet peeve with me when I hear people--usually ones who don't seem that familiar with how searching the web for info using Google actually works or assume that Google "knows" everything--discuss "Googling" either themselves or other regular everyday people that they know and suggesting that this is a surefire, easy way to instantly turn up a heaping treasure trove of data on literally anyone. I was reminded of it again yesterday when I was listening to a segment of The Moth radio show where someone was talking about the all-powerfulness of the Google search and how she was obsessively digging dirt on a personal enemy and on herself in a really successful way. Her story was amusing, but it just didn't ring true. Because if you are not publicly very well known, and unless you have a really uncommon name, just entering a name into a Google search and easily finding much about the actual person you are searching for is a real hit-or-miss proposition. You are not going to learn everything on Earth about your upcoming blind date (to invoke a cliche) by doing this unless your date is quite well known and has left a big online presence, or you just get lucky.
My little, non-scientific example: For a regular civilian of no particular note or importance, I have left quite a lot of detritus by and about myself on the web, associated with my real name, as a result of my publishing activities, my frequent blogging here and elsewhere, my thousands of Twitter updates, etc. So I decided I would perform a search for myself on Google using only one parameter, my name, Christopher Fletcher. My name is extremely common, and as expected, a whole boatload of other Christophers Fletcher are referenced in the first ten pages of search results (I decided arbitrarily that ten pages is as deep as anyone wants to go unless they have a lot of time to waste). So, probably because of the size of my online presence, I do manage to appear near the bottom of page one of this search, a hit on my M-Brane SF profile page. Page 2 contains a link to my M-Brane Press page. Pages 3 and 4 don't hit on me at all. Page 5 picks up my book The Aether Age on Amazon. Page 6, nothing; page 7 nothing. Page 8 has another hit on Aether Age, this time on Goodreads. Page 9, nothing; and Page 10, another Amazon hit, this time for Cesar Torres' book The 12 Burning Wheels that I published. And that's it, and notice that every one of these has to do with M-Brane and my books, nothing at all personally about me.
I flipped it over to image search, still with only my name as the search term. In images, I don't show up until page 2, and both are book covers from things I was involved in. Other page 2 images include a cute, groovy-looking 17-year-old kid who shares my name, and a gay porn dude whose image takes one to some kind of slash fiction site (so we're getting closer, yo!). An actual pic of me appears on page 3 from one of my M-Brane sites. After that, I don't actually show up again in images except for a few more book and mag covers. There's a couple more porny dudes, a Chris Fletcher who looks a lot like Mark Zuckerberg, and another one who looks a bit like an unhappy Justin Bieber. But none of me.
So you might rightly say that this doesn't prove much since if someone wanted to dig dirt on me, they would put more into their search other than my name. True, but I was having a hard time doing that myself without biasing it too much the other way: getting more specific than someone who doesn't know me well probably could. So I re-ran the search adding one term to my name: "gay." This gets a bit closer. Page one's web results feature me 4 times...but, again, they all have to do with my mag and book publishing activities. And then over the next nine pages, there a few more similar hits. But again, nothing about me, the person. If I had never become a small press publisher, I suspect that it would be well nigh impossible to find any sign of me anywhere by way of a Google search. (By the way, the image search adding the "gay" parameter, isn't hugely different than without it other than my M-Brane profile pic moves up from page 3 to page 2, and all the porn boys move higher as well). (Another "by the way": if one subs "queer" for "gay," then the results change a lot: page one of web results is all about my book Things We Are Not, and the first couple pages of image results are all me and Things We Are Not).
I will occasionally recheck these results because it has come to my attention that a scurrilous and wholly vicious falsehood about me--concocted by a villain!--has appeared online! I will not point anyone to it. I am convinced that no one can find it without inside information. We'll see if the mighty Google ever trowels it up!
My little, non-scientific example: For a regular civilian of no particular note or importance, I have left quite a lot of detritus by and about myself on the web, associated with my real name, as a result of my publishing activities, my frequent blogging here and elsewhere, my thousands of Twitter updates, etc. So I decided I would perform a search for myself on Google using only one parameter, my name, Christopher Fletcher. My name is extremely common, and as expected, a whole boatload of other Christophers Fletcher are referenced in the first ten pages of search results (I decided arbitrarily that ten pages is as deep as anyone wants to go unless they have a lot of time to waste). So, probably because of the size of my online presence, I do manage to appear near the bottom of page one of this search, a hit on my M-Brane SF profile page. Page 2 contains a link to my M-Brane Press page. Pages 3 and 4 don't hit on me at all. Page 5 picks up my book The Aether Age on Amazon. Page 6, nothing; page 7 nothing. Page 8 has another hit on Aether Age, this time on Goodreads. Page 9, nothing; and Page 10, another Amazon hit, this time for Cesar Torres' book The 12 Burning Wheels that I published. And that's it, and notice that every one of these has to do with M-Brane and my books, nothing at all personally about me.
I flipped it over to image search, still with only my name as the search term. In images, I don't show up until page 2, and both are book covers from things I was involved in. Other page 2 images include a cute, groovy-looking 17-year-old kid who shares my name, and a gay porn dude whose image takes one to some kind of slash fiction site (so we're getting closer, yo!). An actual pic of me appears on page 3 from one of my M-Brane sites. After that, I don't actually show up again in images except for a few more book and mag covers. There's a couple more porny dudes, a Chris Fletcher who looks a lot like Mark Zuckerberg, and another one who looks a bit like an unhappy Justin Bieber. But none of me.
So you might rightly say that this doesn't prove much since if someone wanted to dig dirt on me, they would put more into their search other than my name. True, but I was having a hard time doing that myself without biasing it too much the other way: getting more specific than someone who doesn't know me well probably could. So I re-ran the search adding one term to my name: "gay." This gets a bit closer. Page one's web results feature me 4 times...but, again, they all have to do with my mag and book publishing activities. And then over the next nine pages, there a few more similar hits. But again, nothing about me, the person. If I had never become a small press publisher, I suspect that it would be well nigh impossible to find any sign of me anywhere by way of a Google search. (By the way, the image search adding the "gay" parameter, isn't hugely different than without it other than my M-Brane profile pic moves up from page 3 to page 2, and all the porn boys move higher as well). (Another "by the way": if one subs "queer" for "gay," then the results change a lot: page one of web results is all about my book Things We Are Not, and the first couple pages of image results are all me and Things We Are Not).
I will occasionally recheck these results because it has come to my attention that a scurrilous and wholly vicious falsehood about me--concocted by a villain!--has appeared online! I will not point anyone to it. I am convinced that no one can find it without inside information. We'll see if the mighty Google ever trowels it up!
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