The unGoogled life is not worth living
A new Pew view of Internet users indicates that lots of us do searches on our own names and those of people we know. That shouldn’t raise an eyebrow. What’s surprising, to me at least, is that the numbers aren’t up above 90 percent. According to the latest study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, people are becoming more aware of their digital footprints, with 47 percent saying they’d run an online search on themselves, more than double the number five years ago. A greater number, 53 percent, say they’ve searched the names of family, friends, colleagues, or prospective dates. And about 60 percent say they don’t really give a hoot what information about them is online.
Maybe it’s just living in the valley, but I figured ego surfing would be the first thing a person would do upon being introduced to a Web browser, sort of like checking the new phone book to see if it got your info right, and looking up the names of past and present friends would follow closely. So if you’ve never run a search on your own name, I’m curious as to why. You really ought to do it, at least once, just to make sure you’re not the unknowing target of a “sucks” page and to find out who among those who share your name has risen to Internet prominence (I share a results page with a prize-winning Canadian playwright, a notorious land pirate and several UK professors).
Pew senior research specialist Mary Madden was also surprised that more folks weren’t trying to find themselves online. “Yes it’s doubled, but it’s still the case that there’s a big chunk of Internet users who have never done this simple act of plugging their name with search engines,” she said. “Certainly awareness has increased, but I don’t know it’s necessarily kept pace with the amount of content we post about ourselves or what others post about us.”
A periodic web search of personal information (name, phone numbers, SSN) makes as much sense as periodically checking your credit report. You can’t necessarily change what you find, but you at least know how others have you pegged.
One reason NOT to do it is that there are people who share my name that appear to be having a lot more fun than I am.
If your Internet persona is sufficiently unusual, you may want to create a Google Alert for it. My nom de web (Izzy Cohen) was also the name of (1) the owner of Giant Foods, (2) a bagel mogul, and (3) Sgt. Izzy Cohen, a World War II comic strip character.
Googling for (topic) + “Izzy Cohen” elicits comments on topics I write about, such as anthropomorphic maps, idioms formed by the transliteration of foreign words/phrases, and the tendency for semantically identical concepts to be joined as homonyms across languages.
Anthropomorphic maps were generated by configuring the body of a god or goddess over the area to be mapped. The name of each part of that body became the name of the area or feature under that part. This produced a scale 1:1 map-without-paper on which each place name automatically indicated its approximate location and direction with respect to every other place on the same map whose name was produced in this way.
Izzy
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps/
Fortunately or un-, my name appears to be unique in the online world (especially when spelled correctly, with the accent on the final e). So at least when I ego-surf, I know it’s me they’re talking about.
I too am surprised to see such lower numbers on googling yourself… It would be interesting to see a breakdown in “If you haven’t googled your name, is it because your name is John Johnson? or Bob Anderson?”