Saturday, May 13, 2006

Search Me?

I've done this once before, but it was a very long time ago, so I decided to try it again. I went to the search engines and plugged in my own name. Now everyone thinks of doing this sooner or later, but I was recently reminded of this on another blog. I guess the new theory for searching yourself is to find out if you have been a victim of identity theft. Now I don't know how well it works for that. I didn't find anything suspicious. It's not like your credit card transactions show up on the net or anything. The first time I searched myself I was really surprised when I received 3 million hits! As it turns out my last name is also the name of an obscure college, so every single college paper on the internet that had the colleges name on it turned up as a hit. I didn't get near as many hits this time. It appears that the search engines are much more refined now, either that or my college went out of business. The following is the few hits I did get:

The most interesting one was the first hit, and it was my obituary! I died at the ripe old age of 97 (good for me!) I had a wife named "Bina" (yeah, really...bina) I also had 7 children, 16 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren (damn I was busy little beaver, I think I need a nap).

I also found out that I had another wife named "Marion" in another state ("I swear Bina, I've never met that woman before!").

I was born in Kansas (ahhhh. the waving fields of grain!)

I served on a navy ship as a butcher during World War II. (Yes, proud to do my part to fight the Nazis' thank you.)

I searched with many different search engines, but they all came up with about the same information. Makes you wonder why we have so many different ones. I also searched with my name in quotations and without. With quotations you get a lot less hits. It only gives you the ones that are exactly like you typed it in, but I didn't get my obituary with the quotations and never would have found "Bina". Give this a try if you've never done it before, you just might find some interesting facts about yourself that you never knew. Right now I have to go try to find out what the heck happened to my college ("If it went bankrupt I'm gonna fire that dean!")


3 comments:

Josh said...

My name is pretty common in Mexico so I always get a bunch of random stuff. Never found anything about the real me though.

kimber said...

Apparently, I am a librarian at a Roman Catholic Private school in Connecticut.... how curious, as I also work in a library here! (Does a love of books come with the name?)

Dagoth said...

Hi guys

Liz - yeah this doesn't work too well if your name is John Smith. Fortunately my name not too common. Yes I did find something personal which I hadn't expected but it wasn't identity theft or anything like that...

Kimber - Either Books are bound to your name or you had a twin sister, given up at birth, who grew up just like you...I'll go with the book theory...