Vanity Search

I recently joined Facebook. Pretty quickly, several old high school classmates found me and sent me friend requests. That’s cool.

Out of curiosity, I started looking up some of these old friends’ names on the Web, outside of Facebook. I also looked up old friends who apparently weren’t on Facebook. It’s amazing, and a bit scary, what you can find about someone with a simple Google search.

Then I thought to do a Google search for my own name. (My real name, not “Bullgrit.”) Google brought up 829 hits for my name. Funnily, there’s some guy with my name who’s really into anti-taxation, and apparently has been such an activist for many years.

Besides this anti-taxation guy with my name (who’s probably three-quarters of the hits Google found), there’re several other people with my name: someone in New Zealand, someone who’s posted something on YouTube, someone on LinkedIn. This surprises me, because my name ain’t something common like John Smith.

Digging through the results, going in over a dozen page results, I found a reference actually to me: an old html page from 1998 where I asked a question on a discussion forum about flying strategy in a WWII computer air combat simulator. Going a few pages deeper, I found a minor reference to me working for a computer game company as a freelance writer.

And that’s it. I went through all the page results, and found no more hits on myself. Two very old web pages with a very limited mention of me in regards to a couple of computer games. And you know, I like it that way.

With the way information gets passed around quickly on the Internet, I’m relieved that I’m not scattered all over the place. Maybe in a few more years, those two references to me will disappear and my name will be completely cleared off the Internet.

Bullgrit