Virtual Vanity

Every so often I vanity-google my own name, just to see what happens. I’m sure you do the same; who can resist?

I’ve been the number three “Ian Young” (according to Google) for a while. At number four is a chap at Intel who also shares a middle name with me, although as he apparently has 34 patents and invented the insides of lots of cool things he really by rights ought to be higher. He gets top billing for “Ian Alexander Young”, though.

Judging by the logs, some people find it easier to google for “Ian Young” than they do to remember the URL for this site. When looking at the server logs for the last month, though, I discovered that a fair number of people look for “iay” too. I’ve been using that identifier to log into things since about 1979 and sometimes have difficulty remembering my “human name”, but I didn’t realise this applied to other people too. Of course, they may have been looking for The Institute for the Study of Antisocial Behaviour in Youth, which comes above me in that search. No, the picture of the antisocial youth on their web site isn’t of me.

This is all rather strange but to me the most bizarre thing of all is that my Second Life avatar gets two of the only six hits for “Alexander Daguerre” (with the quotes this time). I suppose if I had thought about it, I could have looked for a combination Google had no record of and had the results page all to myself. How long before people start choosing names for their children that way?