Saturday, July 18, 2009

Saturday Day Night Genealogy Fun (?) - Google Yourself

It's Saturday Night, and time for some Genealogy Fun. Here are the directions (I know, not everyone follows directions to these little escapades, but what matters are the results, not being a stickler for details) for tonight's little game:

1) Google yourself at www.google.com. Put your first name, middle initial and last name, plus the name of your city or town in the Search box to see what other persons may have mentioned you online, or to see which blog aggregators are "collecting" you.

2) Then go to the "Images," "Videos" and "News" links and see what they show.

3) Tell us about any surprises you found, either in your blog or in Comments to this post.

Here's mine:

1) I put ["randall j seaver" 'chula vista"] into the Search box and received:

* Web: 1,530 matches (but only 24 when I scroll through them)

With ["randy seaver" "chula vista"]:

* Web: 1,670 matches (but only 97 when you scroll through them)

2) With ["randall j seaver" 'chula vista"]:
* Images: 381 matches
* Video: 0 matches
* News: 0 matches

With ["randy seaver" "chula vista"]:

* Images: 179 matches
* Video: 0 matches
* News: 0 matches

3) Surprises: My blog posts are being collected by a number of blog collectors, including:

* The Angers blog

* Feedage.com

* Official Family Site

* Ancestry World Forums

I'm sure that there are more of these types of sites - they just didn't come up with the Search terms.

I didn't find any images that were not from my blogs. Of course, by specifiying the location in the Search terms, you limit then ubmer of matches.

5 comments:

Martin said...

I was quite surprised to find an explosion for my name. "Martin E. Hollick" now yields 20,200 hits whereas "Martin Hollick" 3,810. The same searches on Google Images gets me my picture as well as the front of my only book.

I'm also in Google Books. My story has to do with one time Googling me in Google Books and seeing my name mentioned in an acknowledgment of an academic text. I had no idea that I had helped that person as a librarian--but there I was. The gift of having and unusual name.

Bill West said...

Randy.
Tried this but the response was so
low it was almost negligible. Not
surprising since I'm pretty much a small potatoes sort of guy!

Mary said...

What a profoundly humbling experiment...no surprises, no pictures, and barely a mention.

As the song says, "I think I'll just go out and eat worms" ;0

Tex said...

Mine's posted at my blog at www.allmyancestors.com/blog. As Mary says, pretty humbling. :-)

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

I apparently don't exist if you use my middle initial and the names of the places I've lived. Without the middle initial I show up in an old work directory and one other work related site that I wasn't aware of that had cool pics that I was happy to find. The rest were all genealogy related :-)

Using my maiden name I got too many hits to wade through, mostly obits or family trees. Using my nickname/maiden name I found myself on facebook and most of the rest of the hits were for men.