Is your name "Jonathan Snook"? I'm sorry.
I did a quick ego-search on Google for "Jonathan Snook". I feel bad for any other Jonathan Snook's in the world. In the first 100 links, only about 4 of them didn't apply to me. Is it the power of a 'blog'? Although, if anyone ever needs to track me down, I shouldn't be hard to find. There's my site, my Flickr profile, my Odeo profile, my Blogger profile... If I stopped contributing to the online world today, I wonder how long it would take to become insignificant in search engines. Oh, how existentialist.
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You are the search engine. :-)
Similarly, I've been meaning to make a page of links to other people named "Michael Moncur" because I feel guilty for dominating the results.
This is the benefit of not being named "Smith", of course.
Michael: Funny you mention that. I'm the #1 result for "Nathan Smith" on Google, beating out a lawyer, doctor, photographer, and NHL player. I even top the guy who has NathanSmith.com (which I've considered backordering). I'm not sure if I should though, as it'd be underhanded.
Yep, having an original name helps mine is Tammie Lister and not a apart from never having met anyone with that name this is my married name and my maiden name was also original in sense of search engines. Although in real life being the only one with a name isn't good for hiding - school proved that to me being the only Tammie in the school.
lol, know that as well (without being overly egocentric neither ;). Fortunately, there is only one family in Germany called "Meiert", thus it was pretty easy to annex this name on SERP's. Interestingly, there is a relatively popular guy called Meiert Avis out there who represented more or less serious competition.
Bad luck though for another family member who has the same name as me - he currently wouldn't make it into the top 1.000 search results. And another story are firstnames, of course. That's surely the same thing for "Jonathan", becoming the number 1 "Jens" is a hard fight. Nationally, I'm currently ranked #5, and internationally, it's #20 (record was #11). Nice SEO training, right.
It's nice to have a name that's unique. I don't think I'll ever have to worry about another P.J. Onori popping up. When you start hitting the top ten for just your first name, you know you've hit the big time. :)
I didn't think Yvonne Adams would be all that common, but it turns out I'm moonlightling as a British antiques dealer and a watercolor artist in Northern Ireland.
Between that and selling real estate in California (where I haven't lived for 16 years), it's no wonder I rarely post to my blog.
I am the early-90's ASCII artist, however.
Try egoSurf.
heh. I got a score of 9787 which should technically put me in at #4 according to their "biggest egos" list. Not bad. :)
must be nice to have a name with only 240K Google matches. mine has "about 4,950,000",
I know the exact feeling. I have the same phenomenon with my name. I was actually taken aback a few weeks ago, when a clerk at a store recognised my name as the same name of a girl he went to university with at the same university where I work.
I think the Germans have some weird kind of advantage. I'm sure there's more than one Willerich family in Germany, then again, a phonebook search in a post office, aged 10, reveiled no Willerich from the coast till Bremen, and that was a cousin of my dad. Then my mum had handed in the parcel and dragged me away. Rats.
So, if you find a Matthias Willerich on the web, it's probably me; so far I haven't found anyone else with the same name. I agree, you can't hide like that, so I gotta behave.
Thinking about it: would you want to meet anyone with your full name? I knew 3 guys called Sven Schmidt in school, I never envied them for their name.