Looking yourself up (and down)

Today, I googled myself - for the first time in years. I decided to do so, as a result of someone telling me that they had looked me up on the 'Net. Luckily, nothing untoward turned up, and I breathed a big sigh of relief. Not because I do anything dodgy, mind, but because the last time someone started off the sentence with, "I googled you today..." it was followed by, "...did you know that some of the links take you to a porn site?"

Imagine my horror, when I discovered that someone had taken vast sections of a writing website and somehow grafted it onto their porn site, so that anyone doing a search of a writer featured on the latter would be directed to a page with extremely dubious content. 

It took Google several days to fix the problem, and the writers' site had to close down  to sort out the cyber-mugging. Whilst all this was happening, I chewed my nails and obsessed about the number of people who might have seen the link and wondered about my character.

Fortunately, at about the day 2 mark, I had a reality check and realised, that as I wasn't Angelina Jolie (or even Angelina Ballerina), it was very unlikely that anyone had googled me at all, apart from the person who had called me. Which was a relief... 

I also realised that I was lucky to have a unique name - a blend of an unusual Japanese name and a fairly uncommon English surname - as this makes the odds of any other Mio Debnams being out there, doing dodgy things and sullying 'our' good name, very low. 

Mind you, even having a naughty homonymous self isn't the worst case scenario - just imagine if you were the other Britney Spears - or 'No, no, not that Michael Jackson'!

How bad would that be? It makes the mind boggle doesn't it?

Let's do a social experiment... Next time you're on Google, look yourself up, and let me know if you find any alternative You, and whether they look like the type of person you wouldn't mind being, or would definitely NOT want to be!

Comments

[tammy]

I googled myself, after being told (from different people) that there's a porn 'star' who shares my name.... :(

Now I use my English 'adopted' name and the English version of my Chinese name together. (In the past I only used my 'adopated' English name and my Chinese surname.)

[Heather]

You must have watched that link from angiegie! I too immediately googled myself afterward, and was sad to discover that where previously I was one of only 2 of me on the internet, now there's hordes of us!
They all seem like a bunch of do-gooder types too :(

[Angela]

I haven't googled my name in a long time but I know there are 2 others with my name in the US and one other person outside the US who I met on FB.

Glad to hear that your original name is now clean again.