Has Googling yourself changed how you interact with the 'net?

August 23, 2023 5:23 AM

#metafilterfundraiser2023. Have you ever Googled yourself? Were you surprised by the information you found? Did it cause you to change how you post on the 'net and/or social media and if so, what changes did you make?
posted by Brandon Blatcher to Society & Culture (26 answers total)

Ten years ago I left a job in which I was a minor public figure, and for which my leaving was likely to generate some media attention, and since then I have exercised iron discipline and never Googled myself even once. Better not to know.
posted by Rhedyn at 5:28 AM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am lucky to share a name with a more famous person with said name. So, most of the results on my real name are him, not me.
posted by wittgenstein at 5:47 AM on August 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I did Google myself occasionally in the past, and just now. Results are, not surprising, dominated by my last job from which i recently retired after 16 years, and because it was a very public facing role there is some but nothing embarrassing.
Because of the job I have always been very careful to keep my private use of social media limited and under a separate identity / fake name and even so to keep a fairly low profile. So I would say indirectly it has affected me.
posted by 15L06 at 6:01 AM on August 23, 2023

i joined mefi in the early 00s and googling my screenname leads right back to me. i joined reddit in the late 00s and googling my screenname does not lead anywhere. my posts on reddit are likewise careful not to lead back to me.
posted by noloveforned at 6:06 AM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, I even have a vanity google alert for my name. I have a unique name (or close to it) and at one point I was trying to make something of a name for myself as a writer. Then I got some book deals and was trying to keep on top of the publicity/make sure anyone googling my name got pointed to a way to find or buy my books.

The google alert for my name has quieted considerably — although I did just get a hit from bonappetit.com in which I was described as a "culinary personality"! The quieting down of the google alerts is a pretty good stand-in for the direction of my cookbook career. It's all good, though. :)
posted by fruitslinger at 6:16 AM on August 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Back in the early 00s, the internet was a different, smaller place. I used to secretly check on a former middle-school friend, and it was easy to find her incredibly personal blog in those days. (Her family had moved states rather suddenly because of the housing market apparently, and there had been an older boyfriend and a touchy feely principal, and I wanted to know she was alive and hopefully thriving.)

I used to check on a number of people, come to think.... middle-school accidental boyfriend, childhood friend, former neighbor, she who shall not be named... if they did anything connected to their real names, it was a snap to find.

Even in ~2010, in college, I was interviewing a guy from one of my classes for a journo 101 assignment (and was deciding if he was good for dating) so I dug up the screenname he used a lot and found some of his poetry. When I mentioned it, he was all shocked that I knew about it.

So to get back to the question, googling other people has had way more effect than googling myself. These days, lots of people out there with my name, past and present, with far higher internet presence. I used to be very careful about not revealing my name or personal information... last few years, I've just been blabbing my mouth about all sorts of personal stuff online. Should probably be more careful honestly, but there's so much noise it doesn't feel dangerous.
posted by Baethan at 6:40 AM on August 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I do this pretty regularly as a sort of professional hygiene thing. The vast majority of things on the first page of hits are indeed professionally linked, papers I coauthored, my professional-facing social media, posts I made ages ago to technical mailing lists. There's some other stuff in there that shows a little bit of personality, a handful of donation receipts, some comments on a tangentially-professional-but-fairly-miscellaneous blog. But nothing that I think might make a hiring manager say "yikes."

Probably the most interesting thing I ever found is a PowerPoint put together by a coworker at a previous gig, in which this coworker appeared to be claiming that our little CRO was responsible for the work I'd done (and not JUST me -- the entire study I worked on!!) at an academic job I'd held several years prior. I know this sounds like standard "men taking credit for women's efforts" baloney, but he actually named me, so I have no idea what he was thinking. Maybe some conversation we had resulted in a vast misunderstanding. Judging from Google, that site doesn't appear to be online anymore.
posted by eirias at 7:17 AM on August 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I googled myself in the early 2000s and found a blog entry about me with my full name complaining about my activity in high school. It made me incredibly cautious about how I interacted with the internet under my full name moving forward.
posted by corb at 7:42 AM on August 23, 2023

I Googled myself several years ago and discovered that those Dungeons & Dragons articles I wrote will follow me to my tomb.
posted by SPrintF at 8:16 AM on August 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

I have a google alert for my real name. About five years ago a guy in another country with the same name murdered two people in a bar fight. He was arrested and went through a very public, chaotic trial and was sentenced to a long prison sentence. I have to say, it was pretty alarming getting updates in my email each night with the day's testimony.
posted by fortitude25 at 8:47 AM on August 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

So - I used to do it fairly regularly, but I used to be a public speaker in tech. Heh - I have a fairly unique name, so - the first page of results is all me, except for a few others - someone who won on Jeopardy repeatedly, next a realtor, someone who sells liquor/wine and a professional athlete.

Am happy with the results, nothing embarrassing or cringeworthy out there.
posted by rozcakj at 8:48 AM on August 23, 2023

when i google myself, my linked in comes up, my old freelancing website that i used for self promotion, and a lot of book acknowledgements in the frontmatter of books i worked on, which makes me happy even tho i sadly don't do that anymore. my name isn't super common in the us, but is in scandanavia, so most of the hits are for other people. i was a blogger for many years in the early 2000s, and was very strict about not using my real name at all, which i think served me very well given the angsty early 20s things i blogged about.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 9:14 AM on August 23, 2023

I modified one of my internet accounts to include my real name to ensure the top hits for my name was representative of who I am, instead of being pages of containing both my first and last name.
posted by NotAYakk at 9:21 AM on August 23, 2023

My real name brings up official info mostly. LinkedIn, publications, home address/phone (which seems to be impossible to get rid of). I use a pseudonym for all my social media, which is basically Reddit and MeFi. Even my Google account has initials only.

When I got sober and googled myself, including my pseudonyms in my search; too much identifying info from my pre-sober life came up. Even things I had deleted. Stuff from the old usenet days too!

Now I am more careful with even reddit. I delete anything more than a week old. It's wild to see how much is archived.
posted by indianbadger1 at 9:45 AM on August 23, 2023

ChatGPT thinks my solicitor and I are married, which is something of a shock to our respective spouses. Not to mention to my solicitor's children.

What's even funnier is that it goes on and on about how I'm an advocate for women in STEM and then states that my online prominence rose when I married him (a well-known man.)

I feel like Taylor Swift would have a few things to say about that.
posted by DarlingBri at 11:36 AM on August 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am lucky to share a name with a more famous person with said name. So, most of the results on my real name are him, not me.

My family name is distinctive, and somewhat comical to English speakers, and having it was annoyingly conspicuous when I was young, but now I like it because it makes me memorable. But no matter, searching on my full name mostly brings up an individual I'd heard about even before the internet, a southern Christian preacher, retired now. (Sometimes I watch his sermons on YouTube). But on Facebook, there's another, more famous? A bodybuilder who went to Ukraine, is now a freedom fighter. However, he doesn't appear in DuckDuckGo results; instead, a lot of doctors, with not-quite-matching first names. I don't seem to appear at all.
posted by Rash at 12:35 PM on August 23, 2023

Heh. I haven’t Googled or DDGed myself in ages. So, I just did so and...a single iMDB listing consisting of just my name and the name of the project I worked on over 30 years ago. That’s it. Not even my own website. Or my Facebook page.

I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, but I’m not anywhere else in the results. Lotsa very successful folks with the same name came up, including a couple in the same field as me. But not me, save for that lone iMDB hit.

And I’m perfectly fine with that. 😊
posted by Thorzdad at 12:41 PM on August 23, 2023

Up until about 2012, I was #1 for my name on Google, ahead of the celebrity I share a name with. I made a game out of trying to stay #1 ahead of the celebrity. Google eventually figured out that all those people searching for my name were not looking for me, and although it's been years since I checked, I wasn't in the top 4 or 5 pages of results the last time I bothered looking.
posted by COD at 12:50 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

A decade ago, googling my name - with or without quotes - would bring up only Britney Spears and Kevin Federline.

These days, my linkedin is at the top of the page, and it appears that there are at least a couple of other people who share my (formerly) absurdly unique name.

But no, I kind of like that my name is difficult to google without some other metadata involved in the search. Although, because linkedin, photos of me do show up.
posted by porpoise at 2:20 PM on August 23, 2023

I've kept a low online profile over the years and still do, but was surprised to find when I googled my not-so-common real name many years ago that the top hit was a male metalwork artist from the late-19th to early-20th century whose works can be found in museums. His name has almost the same kanji as mine except his first name is read in a wildly different way. It's still the second hit after a little interview I did last year about a certain movie I subbed, and that interview is about the only thing you can find about me online in Japanese.

I just googled my name in English for the first time in years and have found I now have my very own IMDb page! With only one movie to my credit, the one I mentioned above!
posted by misozaki at 2:40 PM on August 23, 2023

I share my (real) name with a lot of other people, which is honestly somewhat comforting to know. I'm not even sure I show up anywhere by that alone, certainly it'd require knowing at least a few other things about me to narrow anything down.
posted by Aleyn at 4:26 PM on August 23, 2023

I have a fairly unique name but not so unique that there appears to be a lesbian sandwich chain owner with the same name in Florida. Mazel tov!
posted by Kitteh at 4:30 PM on August 23, 2023

Yep, it has. I do a search for myself every couple of years and I am happy to say that I can no longer find any hits for myself at all. At one point I could, so it looks like my policy of no pictures, no using my real name etc. is working out well.

I am quite sure anyone professional trying to find me can find me of course. But if you went to the same elementary school as I did, or are some ex-date, you've not got the ghost of a chance of finding me by searching for my name.

Which now leads me to question WHY I have eradicated myself so carefully. It's not like I would mind my old school mates or dates looking me up...
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:14 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've been online since the 90s and have always been good about keeping different levels of separation between different personas and nothing terribly interesting turns up from a basic search on me. If you really scour Usenet, you can find a few interesting tidbits. But a standard search just finds my social media (I have a unique name and use it for my professional social media accounts) and a bunch of my public speaking engagements and research stuff.
posted by Candleman at 7:26 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

My birth name brings up someone in another part of the country, unrelated. My married name brings up my ex-husband's step-mother. Apparently she passed away a couple years ago. My post-married/current name brings up my cousin's ex-wife. She's still teaching in another part of the same state.

I typically use a shortened form of my first name. That and my current last name brings up my LinkedIn, some news about the company I currently work at, and, oddly, an announcement for an album I helped produce more than a decade ago.

I was recently told that I am "hard to internet-stalk". I like it that way.
posted by MuChao at 3:29 PM on August 24, 2023

I have a pretty active online presence and I do a lot of public work (in the arts mainly), so Googling me gets a lot of references to me and my work.

I was pretty surprised to see myself cited in the Wikipedia article for Homestuck though.
posted by creatrixtiara at 8:46 PM on September 13, 2023