Who I Am This Time?

Have you ever Googled yourself? It's interesting to see what pops up.

When I first tried to Google "Barbara Eberhard" years ago, the first entry was about Eberhard I, a graf (Duke) in Germany in the 14th century who was married to a Barbara. There is some evidence that my family may be related to that family, but really it's very hard to tell. One of my uncles has been doing a genealogical search and has the family traced to within a few generations, and those generations come from the same part of Germany. So it's entirely possible that the Barbara from the 14th century and I are related. Even so, I don't take that search as an entry related to me.

These days, when I do a Google search of my name, I find many more links that are actually me. Of the top 9 links returned, 4 are me - my bio as a member of the Advisory Board of the GMU College of Health and Human Services, my LinkedIn page, my bio on our company website, and some kind of website that seems to match bits of information together and tries to match people that way. Still, it's interesting that almost half the searches are "accurate" in the sense that they are about me.

Three of the top 13 searches when I use AOL Search are me - my LinkedIn page, my company bio, and the CHHS bio. Interesting that AOL Search did not find the spoke.com entry.

The newest search engine from Microsoft, Bing, found a bunch of links that none of the others found - my Facebook page, my contribution to Hillary Clinton's campaign from last year, my entry on Classmates.com (which I haven't looked at in years) - for 6 of the 11 links.

Part of the reason that I do these searches on myself is to see if anything bad gets posted about me. Another part of the reason is that, in this day and age, when you meet someone, they often "google" you to see what they can find out. So again, I want to make sure that what's posted about me is appropriate and actually me.

So the question is what would I do if there was a link that was about me, but was not something that I generated. The spoke.com entry is a little weird, but at least it's ultimately about me - my last job, but still it's accurate information. But what if there was some kind of negative information posted. What would I do? Honestly, I have no idea. How would I prove it was untrue, who would I contact to get it changed or removed, and really, does any information on the Web ever disappear completely? I guess I'll cross that bridge if/when it ever comes up.

In the meantime, it's interesting to see what "Barbara Eberhard" yields.

P.S. Extra points for anyone who recognizes where the title of today's blog comes from.