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Comment by a-and | Hacker News Reader

What's unfortunate is that Hristo Georgiev is a very common Bulgarian name.

This isn't a case where a highly uncommon name can lead to a high degree of certainty in association.

I have a longstanding project where I rank graduate creative writing programs by their alumni's appearances in a selection of prize anthologies. This means I spend a lot of time googling authors. There are a number of authors whose internet presence is shadowed by criminals with the same name. Then there are those who are shadowed by more famous people of the same name such as the Australian poet Kate Middleton or the New England essayist Ravi Shankar. Then there are the authors whose names are the same as other writers. So far I haven't had to do an IMDB-style (II) after someone's name although it's come close with some authors differing only by the presence or absence of a middle initial. And one instance I had to try three times to find the correct author of one particular name because there were two others (not anthologized) who published under identical names. I have a short story that turns on the whole name confusion thing that was published last year. https://sandyriverreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2020...

I was so happy to find out 15 years ago that I have the same name as multiple pro athletes, both about the same age as me, too. I very much want to be un-Googleable.

It depends on what you do. I like that, if someone searches on my name, I'm the only person they come up with.

I have a pretty common Dutch name. At my current company, I'm at least the second person with my first name-last name combination. Same at a previous company. When I became freelancer and registered with the chamber of commerce, a company with my exact name already existed.

I can probably post all sorts of horrific crap on the internet without anyone ever being able to trace it back to me.

The most problematic thing is when you share an unusual name with someone notorious who might plausibly be you at first glance.

I went to grad school with someone who later lived in NYC. He shared a name with someone who basically was the cause of George Steinbrenner (NY Yankees owner) getting banned from baseball for a few years during the same period. Obviously not a popular NYC figure.

This was pre-web etc., but my friend ended up with death threats left on his answering machine.

I have an uncommon name yet there are at least 4 (I discovered a new one today via Google) of us who share the same name and are all within 2 years in age. One of the other versions of "me" lives in the same state I grew up in.

Fortunately, none of us are too notorious, though one alternate "me" has pretty poor credit and another has been sued a couple of times recently.

I'm actually not sure why I'm unique, at least in Internet times (someone much older turned up in a search at one point). Neither my given name nor surname are that rare. But they aren't super-common and are from different European nationalities so I guess that's enough to collapse into a unique point.

I have a relatively uncommon name, yet I've still come across two people who could be mistaken for me at first glance. One comes from the same county as me, and the other went to the same university. The former died 18 months ago in a car crash, so the first result for my name is now "[name] named as victim in [location] crash" (and there's a recommended search for "twitter" that uses my photo), which is a little strange to see.

This is why the media usually refers to well known criminals by their full (first middle last) names.

Which sometimes gives the false impression that criminals naturally go by all three names. A lot of TV shows will create a fictional serial killer named something like John Michael Doe because that sounds more "sinister" than just John Doe.

Its good to get this data point - from my familiarity with first names and last names, both Hristo and Georgiev are fairly unique and almost unheard of. The combination of both would qualify as a VERY unique name in my worldview. But, in Bulgaria, eh, very common :-).

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