Google yourself

Do you guys google yourselves? I just posted about doing this in another thread, but I was wondering if this is something you guys do. What pops up under your name? How does google decide what makes it to the top of the search and how do you get something that shows up on page four or five of the search results to show up sooner? It feels sort of weird to google myself, but I wondered what publishing people might see if they googled me. Do agents and editors google people before they decide to work with them? This isn't something I've given to much thought to, but we google agents and editors we're interested in. It makes sense that they might do the same, no?

 

yep!

Mostly chinese food restaurants and towns come up when I google my name.
But mixed in there are national athletic websites like MileSplit, USATF and NCAA which have tracked my stats since I was in the 8th grade.

Once, though, my name popped up on this WebComics site, and I was so confused because I had never made an account there or anything. It was literally my WHOLE NAME. So i clicked it and it and it had me down as a "published author." this freaked me out. So i tracked down the person who made the page (yeah, I know, super paranoid here...) and found this guy's DeviantART page. So I sent him this very passive aggressive message demanding how he got my information and blah blah blah.
Come to find out, he was one of the editors for a fiction journal that published one of my stories, and for some reason, everyone who got published in that journal, their names were listed on the WebComic's page.

Still don't completely get it... the person never responded to my message (I wouldnt have responded either). I was super embarrassed and never attempted to submit there again. Ha!

When I google now, it has my linkedin page and the blog posts I've written for work in addition to 2 publications that have my stories archived to their page.

 

I haven't googled myself in years. it could be a herd of wombat ballerinas as the first result for all I care.

 

I feel like the answer is yes? I mean, employers google potential employees.
When my first job out of college, my employer flat out said he stalked my FB page. When we were hiring again, he had me look up the people on social media.
And look in to what else they've done via google.

I know the NCAA did that while i was in college. A few athletes got warning or suspended from the NCAA for stuff they posted on their pages.

I always just thought thats hiw it goes with anything professional. You're representing someone else, so they want to see if you are a good fit to represent what they are about.

Atleast, thats how i see it... I stopped thinking about what others see because then id start getting depressed

 

I hadn't googled myself in a long time. Nothing related to me comes up! Good to see that the effort I put into remaining an internet hermit has worked.

 

Do you really not care about your online footprint or having one that you feel represents you? I feel like it's important for writers to have some stuff pop up. Even without googling myself I've always wanted my social media to represent me accurately and in a favorable light. But my social media doesn't even show up when I google myself. That's okay. I was just curious what someone else might see. And by someone else I mean industry professionals who might check up on me (if I'm so lucky).

 

I think your approach is probably correct for most on this website. I write as a hobby, and I don't think I would benefit from marketing myself in my industry (not inherently at least... I'm sure anybody could benefit from great marketing) so I enjoy keeping my online footprint virtually nonexistent.

 

I don't have the energy to worry about that. my concern is writing books that earn out my advances.

 

Their search engine considers some 200+ factors which determine where you end up in the results. It’s subject to a process of somewhat Skynet-esque continuous self-learning, so it develops incrementally on a daily basis toward evermore sophisticated means of matching searcher intent with site content. Every time you carry out a successful search you’re effectively training the ‘intelligence’ behind it.

I can't speak for agents and editors, but it's increasingly common practice in recruitment to carry out candidate research online. I google myself every so often to make sure there's nothing particularly incriminating floating around.

 

I google myself a few times each year. Because I am not on social media, there is almost nothing under my name. But there is a guy who has almost the same name except one letter and he is the director of the canadian naturism society. And it's not a joke

 

I don't have a common name, or so I thought . Google has hundreds of versions of me including obituaries. I don't bother any more

 

I don't show up anywhere except on those scam websites (and man, are there a lot of them) that pretend to offer information about the people listed but two clicks in, they're demanding money.

 

I have. Nothing comes up.

If you search my name + 'Japan' a lot of my writing comes up though as well as blogs/facebook posts etc.. commenting on it.

I do long to be something more than a Japan commentator but everyone needs some kind of hook.

 

I do google my author's name when I remember to do it. What comes up are articles on my blog and Goodreads reviews. What also comes up is the self-publishing publisher I work with, Bubok, with links to my books. They are big in Google.

 

I come up as a photographer in Ohio. I am not a photographer, nor do I live in Ohio or ever plan to.

 

Sounds like something you shout out of your car window when someone cuts in front of you.

"Go Google yourself!"

 

I estimate there are 500 people with my name in the country. Most are in Texas, where I have never been. The second largest number is in California, where I am from. I share my surname with a small town in Texas.

 

My author name comes up with my Amazon author page at the top, which is nice, but will be nicer once I get my second novel published.

The RL nickname I go by comes up first with the Facebook grab bag of "People Named That on Facebook," then second with my Instagram account. You have to scroll over before any of the featured photos are mine. Then below that, nothing.

When I try my full given name, the first result refers to my LinkedIn, and is seven results down.

I am awash in obscurity.

 

As the years go by less comes up for me, though not very much came up to begin with, a few old fashion shows and random gigs. So weird to think about.

 

I googled myself in trepidation, a mix of fear and excitement . . . only to learn that I overestimated myself.

 

Revival. But I am utterly bewildered upon searching name and title. Must sleep, confused.

I should not be rank 1 on both nickname and full name. Tried it on Tor too. I don't understand. My name is too common. The title too.

 

Bunch of random people with names vaguely similar to mine.
Not surprising because my first name James is one of the most common in the world.
It is kind of sad my Youtube channel and website are only on the 8th page of google though.

 

Twenty years ago, my job involved tracking down witnesses and other people. I had few skills using the internet, yet I managed to track down 95% of the people I was looking for. A few years ago for a different job, the sheriff's office sent me to a Crimes Against Women convention. One of the courses I took was How to Disappear Online. Basically, once one is in the system, one can't disappear, even after weeks of eliminating references and regular scanning to eliminate those that pop up later. The world is full of nasty information gleaners who post one's private information for financial gain. Some of those places get it so wrong, too.

 

Apparently there is a surgeon who shares my name and is rather more active online than I.

Also, some toerag of both my name and (very nearly) a previous address was convicted of something unsavoury a few years ago.

That's a little disconcerting.