Sun, May 31, 2009 page12

• Search engines trying to find a way to personalize our names

  Most of us got our names before search engines came along, and we’re stuck with them, but what if you do have a common name or share it with a famous person?

  • By Jack Schofield / THE GUARDIAN
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  I am not a pilot, so I didn’t write Flights of a Coast Dog: A Pilot’s Log. Also, I’m not standing for Congress in Nevada, and I don’t work for Mad Cat Digital. But if you happen to find a Jack Schofield who edited Photo Technique and The Darkroom Book, who used to go to work on a skateboard and wrote a thesis on allegorical dream fantasy, all of those are me.

  Being Jack Schofield isn’t that difficult because there are probably only a couple of hundred of us. Being Tom Jones or Gordon Brown must be harder, because there are thousands of them, and in each case, only one is really famous. Famous people tend to swamp the search results for everybody else.

  There are benefits to being hard to find on Google, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and similar sites. There are also costs. Many of us routinely name-surf people who invite us out for lunch, “friend us” on Facebook or try to sell us things. If I can’t find you, I don’t have any reason to trust you.

  Parents choosing baby names can now Google their favorites to find how common they are and I think that will lead to babies with more unusual and original names. But most of us got our monikers before search engines came along and we’re stuck with them.

  While adopting an unusual name is the simplest way to raise your searchability, there are other approaches. You can do it by traditional routes such as using your middle name or initial, if you have one (an IBM computer database once turned me into Jack NMI Schofield — No Middle Initial — but I didn’t fancy it) or by hyphenating your mother’s maiden name. You can even have a nickname, such as Steve “Interesting” Davis, though that might not work out too well if you are an accountant or estate agent.

  Google is well aware of the problem, as its corporate mission is to uniquely identify everybody on the planet, and serve us adverts precisely tailored to our needs. Last month it tried to help by introducing a system to “give you more of a voice”.

  Google wants everybody to set up their own public Google Profile (google.com/profiles) complete with a photograph. This has an “About me” section where you can fill in where you grew up, places you have lived, schools attended and companies you have worked for. It also offers to link to other sources such as your Facebook page.

  A Profile page doesn’t remove the problem of thousands of people having the same name. In the long run, however, it should help people find who they want based on other criteria. This is something Facebook does badly.

  Whether it will take off is another matter. Very few people seem to have Profile pages, and they rarely show up — not even when I search for my own name. Profile pages do have a box that lets you search other profile pages, but the results are uninspiring. For example, searching for “Tom Jones” only finds a dozen people with that name (Facebook must have hundreds) and four of those profiles contain no information.

  It makes more sense if your name is already your Gmail address, as then you can have what amounts to a vanity address at Google. Google is promoting this by giving away 10,000 sets of iPrint business cards (in the US) bearing the URL and a Google logo. But that smacks more of desperation than success.

  Either way, the days of inventing a fancy handle and an even more fanciful history for Internet use are fading fast, except in alternate worlds such as World of Warcraft.

  As the Web becomes integrated with everyday life, your real name will be online whether you like it or not. The only question will be whether you own it.
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