collision detection: Should you pick an unusual name for yourself -- so you'll be more Googleable?

May 08, 2007

Should you pick an unusual name for yourself -- so you'll be more Googleable?

There's a fascinating piece in today's Wall Street Journal about how tech-savvy parents are picking unusual names for themselves and their kids -- so that they'll be more googleable. The parents, as the story points out, are aware that search engines dominate modern epistemology: If you can't be found on Google, you don't exist. Ask.com says that 7% of all its searches are for personal names; meanwhile, 80% of executive recruiters do an online search for applicants' names, and 40% of people say they've used search engines to hunt down long-lost acquaintances. Women who acquire a super-common last name when they marry find that they vanish from the googleosphere.

So, as the Journal reports:

In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves -- or their offspring -- to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites' member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that's becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type "John Smith" into Google's search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results. [snip]
Some people have taken measures to boost their visibility online, including creating listings in professional directories and paying companies to help them appear more prominently in search results. Parents-to-be routinely plug baby names into search engines to scout out the online competition. Some actors and musicians weigh the impact of less unique stage names.

The big problem with the article, though, is that it never mentions the most screamingly obvious and generally bulletproof way of ensuring you have lots of Google juice: Blogging. Today's search engines reward people who have online presences that are well-linked-to. So the simplest way to hack Google to your advantage is to blog about something you find personally interesting, at which point other people with similar interests will begin linking to you -- and the upwards cascade begins.

This is precisely one of the reasons I started Collision Detection: I wanted to 0wnz0r the search string "Clive Thompson". I was sick of the British billionaire and Rentokil CEO Lord Clive Thompson getting all the attention, and, frankly, as a freelance writer, it's crucially important for anyone who wants to locate me -- a source, an editor, old friends -- to be able to do so instantly with a search engine. Before my blog, a search for "Clive Thompson" produced a blizzard of links dominated by the billionaire; I appeared only a few times in the first few pages, and those were mostly just links to old stories I'd written that didn't have current email addresses. But after only two months of blogging, I had enough links to propel my blog onto the first page of a Google search for my name. Sometime soon afterwards I moved to the #1 spot, and these days a search for the single word "clive" -- an extremely common name outside the US -- produces my blog as the fifth result on the first page. Woo hoo!

Okay, I'll stop the gratuitous boasting. But the question remains: Why didn't the Journal piece talk about this? Possibly because the writer had unconsciously adopted the corporate/advertising view of the Internet, which is that, dammit, there's got to be some way to throw money at this problem and automatically vault our company's crapola product to the center of the nation's attention, right? Corporate interests generally hate Google, because they cannot easily buy their way to prominence. Not that it stops them from trying: That's why there's an industry in "search engine optimization" -- which the Journal duly namechecks -- and, of course, splogs and spambots. But the truth is that the only way to get really good, durable google juice is to work for it. There's no magic solution. You certainly can't just sit around and expect the search engines to love you because you're, like, awesome.

I particularly like the fact that whenever someone bemoans the ungoogleability of those with unduly-common names, they use the example of "John Smith." Hey, all you John Smiths: You're doomed! Give up! You'll be drowned in a tsunami of hits for the historical John Smith of Pocahontas fame, right?

Yet if you actually do a Google search for John Smith, you find that indeed, the top few hits are for the famous John Smith, as well as the current UK politician John Smith. But you'll also find that seventh hit on the first page is for ... John Smith, a British folk musician.' This isn't a guy with a big ad budget, or even, as far as I can tell, any advertising budget at all; he sells through CD Baby, which indicates to me that he's totally indie. But clearly he's amassed a lot of Google juice, and it's probably because he's made a few smart moves that are likely to attract links: He offers plenty of samples of his music, as well as several completely free MP3s, and has a guestbook for comments. I bet if he added a blog to his site he could kick himself up even higher on the Google rankings.

The problem with this solution to Google anonymity is precisely that it requires so much work. As people noted in my thread on Radical Transparency a few months ago, the Web and the blogosphere privilege the time-rich, which means they're hardly meritocratic. I regularly get swamped with work and don't blog for weeks at a time, which I personally hate -- when I'm not blogging it feels like a juicy part of my brain has shut down, and I generate far fewer useful ideas; but it also terrifies me because I know that I'm probably losing Google juice. I'm rarely time-rich.

On the other hand, I prefer a world that gives some advantage to the time-rich over one that reserves all the advantages to the money-rich.

Posted by Clive Thompson at May 08, 2007 01:40 PM

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Comments

Commenting (on sites that don't do the "no refer" thing) is an even better way of associating your site with yourself. Blogging is great, but it's hard to pick up a lot of external links.

Though with a name like Jemaleddin, it wasn't hard for me to get the #1 spot in Google anyway. =-)

Posted by: Jemaleddin at May 8, 2007 3:27 PM

The interesting corollary is when you decide to become Google annonymous. What do you do when you want to stop being number 1?

Previously my site was No 1 for google searches on my blog. I moved into a new job last year which was goin gto give me a professional public presence that didn't fit with the more irreverant tone on the blog. I needed to annonymise myself.

I went and stripped out all references to my not uncommon surname on the site. I had to ask a some people to change the title of links on their sites, but over a few weeks I dropped down Google's list. Since then I have dropped off them entirely as far as I can see.

Posted by: sliabh at May 8, 2007 3:33 PM

Jemaleddin, yes, commenting is a superpowerful technique! You seed the Internet with tons of links pointing back to your blog, and they're precisely the sort of links that Google most respects: Ones that crop up in organic-growth patterns, slowly and methodically, and thus which clearly aren't crapped out by an autobot.

sliabh, that's an awesome story! I love it ... you should write a guide on how to do it.

Posted by: Clive at May 8, 2007 3:41 PM

Clearly my parents were highly prescient. Mind you, it wasn't my father's choice to have the last name "Barefoot".

I do currently own the top Google spot for Darren, though I suspect problogger Darren Rowse will eventually oust me. We've both beaten up on the former mainstream media folks, pop singer Darren Hayes and director Darren Aronofsky.

Posted by: dbarefoot at May 8, 2007 4:42 PM

Ahahhahhaa!

Posted by: Clive at May 8, 2007 4:57 PM

i thought about this a couple years ago.

in the past, with very localized exchanges, it did not matter if there was someone else with your name somewhere. now it does. so i am wondering, how much would it take to give every human being a unique name? some considerations:

only use meaningful combinations of characters. no ewrjp ewrerwh
make it future-proof, for we may live a very long time
have mappings between languages
would numbers be impolite? somedude23 certainly is

a linguist may be able to calculate how many characters it would take to achieve this feat. i wonder if it would be at a manageable length?

Posted by: Gregor J. Rothfuss at May 8, 2007 8:17 PM

Gregor, that's a superb post, and I'd love to see a linguistic calculation of the most efficient possible heuristic to generate a unique name for the planet's entire population. (Or perhaps, say, an heuristic that can generate 1 trillion names, to leave a bit of room for growth. The original specification for internet addresses, IPv4, allowed for 4.3 billion unique identifiers, which probably seemed like a lot back in 1981 ... but which has turned out to be so miserly a total that we're shifting to IPv6, which offers much more flexbility.)

I disagree, though: I don't think numeric components to names are rude. Then again, I wouldn't, since my full name is Thomas Clive Thompson the 3rd; I'm one of the vanishing breed of westerners whose name actually requires a numeric component to distinguish me from my forebears. Quite apart from totally poncy-sounding 2nds and 3rds and 4ths, though, I think names with numbers in 'em are pretty cool, as with the New York Times writer Jennifer 8. Lee.

Posted by: Clive at May 8, 2007 8:45 PM

Perseverance, my friend. Google likes pages that have long-lasting presence. So you can spam the web to get your 15 minutes of fame, but the next tide will take your name with it. But if you say one thing people really notice, it sticks. The downside, of course, is that it sticks even when you don't want it too. Hence, for some reason, I can't make my old stuff go away, no matter how much new stuff I spatter around. Or maybe it will, if I say something significant for a change. Anyway, that's just the way it is, right? X-Transparency. Nothing you do will ever go away.

I ran a few experiments. Searching on my first name brings me up 3rd, after my academic nemesis (not. just that his name always comes up above mine). The freaky bit was searching myself on google images. I know what you look like.

Posted by: yish at May 8, 2007 10:07 PM

Yeah, the perseverance aspect is truly powerful, for both good and ill.

As for pictures of me ... one problem I have is that I haven't seeded the Internet with any photos of myself that I myself have taken. So all one finds are a strange jumble of things -- shots of me while on assignment for Wired, or my formal picture for the Knight Fellowship I did at MIT, or a pic of me on my transcriber's corporate web site. It's rather like being someone who's never blogged or uttered anything online, and then finding what weird stuff Google kicks up about you.

I do intend to hire someone in the near future to slightly redeign this blog to incorporate rolling Flickr and video imagery, mostly as a spur for me to start taking more pictures and video myself. Without the architecture in place I'll never do anything ...

Posted by: Clive at May 8, 2007 10:26 PM

I think Google results are another example of scientific principles starting to back up something that was intuited long ago: Being interested in things makes you an interesting person. Comment on things far and wide across the web, and your own blog jumps higher in the results.

Posted by: Tony at May 9, 2007 8:20 AM

"Being interested in things makes you an interesting person": Someone should translate that into latin, and make it the Official Slogan Of The Internet.

Posted by: Clive at May 9, 2007 12:27 PM

Cory Doctorow talks (somewhere; I'd link if I had any idea where to find it) about the next Internet apocalypse - when reliable image recognition techniques means that *every* picture of you on the Internet can be found and tagged. Drunk at a friend's party? In the background of the Zapruder film? It won't be just the formal shots that are officially labelled with your name that will be identified as you.

Posted by: debcha at May 14, 2007 11:44 AM

Parents naming children for their Google potential in this age of social networks, instant connections and communications may give them Google bragging rights, but may not be a great idea. Not only could this lead to revealing personal identifying information, but to all other sorts of complications not even known, and what comes to mind is "how could you name me that..." It is true if you blog you are up near the top. I googled my own name and came back with quite a few top entries (along with others with the same name, but not many). I do not have a unique name, and certainly a common last name as I was given my name in a time and place when none of this existed and proves somewhat the value of blogging and linking.

Posted by: Brenda Freedman at May 29, 2007 5:21 PM