The First/Last Ratio
by Alex
Ever since I have been hired as a professor I have been more and more concerned about what people find out about me when they search for me on the web. Or maybe I should say: ever since I was hired as a professor and then went and wrote a blog entry about laxatives. At any rate I did what I rarely do as a result and checked the Google results for “Alex Golub” and “Alex” respectively.
I’ve been the top hit for “Alex Golub” ever since there _was_ such a thing as Google hit, and I did this on purpose to make sure that _I_ was affecting the results for my name and not other people. It is only in hindsight that this was actually the wrong strategy since it meant I then had to figure out what to say and — more importantly — avoid saying anything stupid. Which is actually very hard to do.
What struck me about searching for my full name this time around is how far you have to go to learn about any of my other Googlegangers. Alex Golub the tennis player, who once shared page results with me, has now vanished. Even Alex S. Golub, award-winning surgeon, has been relegated to one brief mention surrounded by more redirects to me. That is on the ninth page of the Google results.
The tenth page. That means that there are _ten pages_ of me on Google. I am not sure I am particularly happy about this.
Now turn to the ultimate — and more realistic — measurement of Googlejuice: first name Google searches. I do not especially mind that I am nowhere near the top of Google searches for “Alex.” As far as I am concerned Alex King deserves all the Googlejuice he wants for getting WordPress together. Frankly I am just happy that someone has unseated “that friggin parrot”:http://www.alexfoundation.org/alex.htm from the top of the results. The first mention of my name comes on page 10 of the Google results for Alex.
I think its telling in some undfinable way that the ratio of first name pages to whole name pages is so close. I have no idea why. Perhaps we should call it the Parrot Coefficient? The closer we get to 1 the closer we approach celebrity? Much more interesting (and ego inflating) than working about such posh as absolute ranking.
I thought mine would be weirder with the brand name thing blowing me out of the water at Google, but I found myself on the fifth page when just searching “guinness”. Far fewer references to my full name than yours though, with a meager one page.
What an interesting exercise in vanity. I would have thought that a search just on my first name would quickly yield results, but I was wrong. Some British professional motorbike racer appears to get most of the hits, along with some radio scholarship program and a shiteload of geneaology sites. Lots of hits on the given+sur, but that’s not surprising given my patronymic. Has Tojo tried this yet?
I ve been thinking about my representation in googlesphere, too after my referrerstats a few days ago showed me again someone has googled ‘Annariitta Grzonka’. The thing is not to avoid stupidities in writing as I m well aware being in public with my scribblings right from the beginning, its rather that google shows only some posts and some comments. And I cannot influence what appears in the googlaik and what not. Thats the weird thing about being googled.