If I search online for my full name...

I'm currently the top hit for Firstname Lastname -- but if you throw in my middle name or initial, I don't show up at all. Surprising considering there are only five people with my first and last name currently alive, one of which shares my middle name. References to dead people with my name tend to show up on the first page.

If I search for my name, I trigger the PORN FILTERS

I hear that when you get a Silicon Valley job your Google profile is very important. Well, there are lines of work where the exact opposite is true, it has become a struggle NOT to exist and keep your data private.

It used to be that I searched for my name and I was top spot, quite proud of it. I've since wise up. Luckily a huge influx of Facebook idiots have the same name and my results are buried. Some mailing lists posts and computer security research results are particularly pesky.

Is very common. I'm more common than dirt.

This presents a problem, should I get down to writing as there are known authors with all or part of my name. I'll have to sub parts or develop a pen name.

Anonymous J. Coward

I don't usually go by my full, middle, and last name, but interestingly my M.S. Thesis from 1985 comes up. Nice to know it's still out there somewhere.

I try to stay quite anonymous on the Internet. But the one thing that I can't avoid are the patents with my name on them. So anyone wanting to dig up some dirt on me could at least find out where I live (or lived) and who I work (or worked) for.

So that is the one thing that prevents me from disappearing from the face of the planet.

before the football player became famous, the results for my name were mainly for a porn star.

If I start typing my full name, Google autocompletes with "murders"...

What did people do before the Internet? In a scene from a movie about the cartoonist Harvey Pekar, the actor portraying him in American Splendor [youtube.com] (Paul Giamatti) does a 3 minute soliloquy about his name being listed in telephone books more than once and its somewhat disconcerting affects. Apparently, it's a social activity independent of present technology.

Some dumbarse actor stole my name and he's the only one that comes up on the first page. I'm top of the second page though!

Turns out I helped run the Clinton campaign. Who'd have thought?

My personal site used to come up as the top hit for a Google search for "Steve Foerster" (with quotes). Now it's not there at all, because someone sent Google a DMCA takedown notice. Evidently the WordPress theme I used had an image in it that its designed had cribbed from someone's photobucket account, or something like that. I changed the theme, and one of these days will get around to sending Google a challenge notice. But what a mess -- if the copyright holder had simply told me, which would have taken no more effort and probably less, I'd have changed the theme.

It takes some effort to get a "clean" search, because Google tracks your searches and activity, whether or not you are logged in. This results eventually in links pertaining to YOU getting placed higher in the rankings, than they would for other people who search for your name. You might have to use somebody else's computer, or anonymous mode, to get a realistic look at where you come up in search results.

I saw a bunch of stuff from people with the same name. In the past, I found some old dumb question I'd asked on a tech mailing list, but now all I see is the other people.

I have a largely unique last name. If I Google firstname lastname, I get two about me on the front page, one bio from my current prime client and a thing I helped write decades ago about connecting modems to hotel telephone lines; then pages and pages about my brother the writer and my father the (late) senior scientist.

I used to be up there in the search results, but not anymore. I've been on the WWW a while and a lot of the top matches for my name used to be random mailing list posts of mine. (And back then we always used nicknames for sites like this one, so no old forum posts are tied to my actual name.) Now there's a prominent politician from Massachusetts with my name and a lawyer in a big city so you have to dig to find me. (And you won't even know I'm me, because another guy with my name works in my field.) And there are 24 of me on linkedin. I own my own firstlast.com but there's nothing worthwhile there.

middle name is ');
last name is Drop table users

Searching Google for my full name resulted in nothing, just whitespace from google.

To my knowledge there is not a single other person on the planet with my full name, even excluding middle names.

I decided to go by "BJ Black" when I was 7 years old--years before I realized that Googling that would result in interracial porn.

Nowadays, Google is smart enough to SEO me as the top hit and (relatively) safe sites behind that. For interracial porn, you have to do an image search with safesearch off.

If I search my name on Google, I get hits from my firm's website. If I search any other search engine, I am nowhere to be found. Google knows my IP address, so they give me pages about myself. If I search Google on my phone using the mobile network, it's all other people with the same name (my phone is not linked to my Google account). Just because Google serves you up as the first hit for your name, don't assume that everyone else is seeing the same results.

Just to be on the safe side I always register my name on every popular social network and then I leave it blank.

This way if anyone searches for me it receives the correct result full of nothing.

Lots of stuff about me. Then a Wikipedia entry on a serial killer with my same name and birthday... I'm sure it's interesting when employers Google that.

Thanks to my parents' decision to go with a hyphenated last name, my full name is (as far as I can tell) globally unique. This is actually a great thing for me, since I'm in academia and it's best if people can just google my name and find papers I've written etc.

It's not me, honest! I am not zombie posting.

If you google for my name , either full or with middle, I am the only one that turns up in America with that name.
In europe it is a different story, as my last name is the equivalent of "smith" over there.

And I am it. There has never been, nor is there likely to ever be another with my name - the given name is very common, but the surname is rare enough.