Do You Google Yourself? Are You Hiring? | Hacker News Reader

Do You Google Yourself? Are You Hiring?

priceonomics.com

91 pointsbeniaminmincu27 comments

I started to work at AdRoll a few months ago and it got me to think of different ways to use retargeting, while remembering about this story.

For example, if you're looking for a job as a designer or an engineer (or whatever else), you're likely to have a site to show some of your projects. Potential recruiters that end up visiting your site can then be advertised to specifically.

I was also thinking of blogs: you can probably recapture an audience when you write a new post. I.e. one of your posts gets popular on Hacker News, but people won't necessarily start following you or subscribing, but you could advertise for your new posts later.

I'm surprised not to have heard of another story similar to that Google one since then, but there is potential if you think about it.

edit: actually, I remember reading about a guy who had targeted his significant other using a Facebook ad for some purpose (maybe a proposal?).

Congrats on the new job.

Have you tried Geeklist https://geekli.st ?

Over the years I've been sort of refining what you get when you search my name.

So if you search for my name on either Google or DuckDuckGo now, the top 5-6 results are about me. It's mostly just Facebook/Twitter/GitHub/LinkedIn and other things like that, but they are all me.

I guess that is positive when I'm finished with school and need to start applying for jobs :-)

I'm not sure it will even pay off, it's not that you need to do that much, just try to get stuff you do not want to show up removed.

Covering up something stupid (with any kind of spread) probably isn't going to work. But if you have a completely unrelated result showing up for a hobby of yours that doesn't really need to be on 'your' front page then you can make small edits to make it rank worse. Perhaps remove your name, or write it differently just that one time.

Given a bit of time you can end up with only the results you want, provided you aren't known enough for someone to be writing about what you are doing with your life.

Silly questions:

1. What is your name ? 2. How do you remove unwanted results? 3. Are you tying all this into your own homepage?

My name is Kristoffer Berdal [1]

You can't really remove unwanted results, unless they are something you have written yourself, but a lot of those are impossible to remove, most places you can't edit old posts.

Besides, I do not think everyone should be held accountable for all the stupid things they wrote on the internet when they were 13 :-)

You can create better results. The more positive results you have, the lower the unwanted things will rank.

Things like projects, articles you have written and so on. If you can get enough of them ranking high then the unwanted stuff will be 'hidden'.

As for tying it into my homepage [2]: I probably should but I haven't so far. It's far from what I want it to be, and mostly just a short introduction and links to my Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/GitHub.

PS: I know the design is _very_ similiar to Mahdi Yusuf's [3] old design, while I didn't copy anything I feel bad it ended up looking so similar. I should give him credit somewhere since it's what inspired me to make it look much cleaner and minimal than it did before.

[1] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kristoffer%20ber...

[2] http://cognitive.io

[3] http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/

Do you mean your full name? My last name is distinct enough to easily get a whole first Google page about me, but my first name only gets my Twitter account on the second page.

Yeah, I mean my full name. I share my last name with a well known Norwegian actor, and she has acted in a few movies with a guy I share my first name with. So whenever there is an article about them, it will pop up in the search for my name.

The only thing actually missing when you google my name now is my website.

Well I just googled my name and one of the results is an obituary. I guess I should be getting my affairs in order...

You're lucky.

My namesake is a Scottish footballer turned premiership manager - he dominates the first 5-6 pages of google results. I get in there on P6 or so, but it's not even my site (just a popular blog where I authored a couple of posts,) and I can't post links on it to my real identities.

If you want to find me, you have to add at least one more word to my name to find the right me. not ideal.

That will make it harder yeah. I share my last name with a danish director and a female norwegian actor.

The actor has been in a few movies with a guy I share my first name with so they tend to pop up into the results for my name whenever they do another movie.

Back in 2002, shortly after GTA3 was released for PC, I started getting involved in its then-fledgling modding community. I created a really basic map mod early on, and then a bit later, I worked on a couple of slightly more advanced things, including a sort of modding tutorial. As the community grew, my stuff started popping up everywhere[1], and a little blurb in some issue of PC Gamer even named me as one of the "pioneers" of GTA3 modding.

Fast forward four or five years, and GTA3 related results still dominated Google searches for my name. I was just about to go to college, and I had an initial phone interview for a part time sysadmin job at a small company close to campus. During the call, the owner of the company happened to google me and suddenly went silent. After a few very long seconds, I piped up:

"...hello?"

"...uh, yeah. So, what's all this about grand theft auto? Were you charged?"

It took me a moment to realize what he was seeing, but once I did, I cracked up. I did my best to explain that it referred to a computer game, not a felony. I even tried to turn it into a selling point, using it as an example of how long I'd been hacking, tweaking, etc. I'm not still not sure he was entirely convinced, but nevertheless, he ended up calling me in for a second interview.

Today, the top results for my name are a bit more professional: my portfolio site, LinkedIn, Facebook, and so on. However, down near the bottom of the first page, you can still find a reference to my stint as a professional carjacker—uh, I mean as a GTA3 modder.

[1] I won't link to them here directly, but if you're curious, it wouldn't take much digging to find my full name and check it out yourself.

Haha, that's brilliant :-)

What if you happen to share a name with a convicted multi-million dollar Ponzi schemer? It's pretty hard to game Google to ignore all the news reports and .gov pages.

Another cute trick is to put places on google maps at 0,0 or another strategic location, so that anyone looking at a place with that location will find it. Last I looked Ace Advertising Signs had put a place at 0,0, it's been removed now I think but you can still see the icon at certain zoom levels on classic maps as the tiles are cached:

https://www.google.com/maps?q=0,0&ll=0,0&z=17&output=classic

This reminds me of the age-old (apocryphal?) trick of buying google ads geo-targeted at SandHill road in Palo Alto when you're raising VC money.

Over some 2 years back I tried this and it worked. I auctioned founder's name in Google Adwords and got call for interview in next 2 days. However, they did not offer the job :(

Btw, that company itself earns most of the money by ads :P

Unless he has the ad executives' consent it was a bad move posting their full names in the video. Something I've noticed about mavericks (myself included, to a degree) is the willingness to engage is unusual/risky behaviour transcends the generally desirable (given that the "desirable" is classically the usual and proven). Arguing against myself, however, advertising is a fertile home for a maverick.

Generalising the experiment, I'm now curious about soliciting executives for business via this method.

These people are essentially famous in their business; what's the harm of posting their names in a video?

This also happens in reverse - recruitment agencies bidding on names of prospects. Certainly got my attention when I was first targeted by this approach.

I know the people reading this and posting here are, for the most part, particularly those who don't mind having their real info out on the web - but for anyone who cares about privacy or being tracked it's worth noting the info-exposure aspect of self-Googling.

Google and other search engines, I would guess, have some algorithm that kicks in when someone searches on a person name, and calculates a probability that the searcher is the person whose name is searched on. This in turn may enable linking the real name with the set of data associated with the searcher by other means (e.g. hits on Google APIs, Google Analytics, etc., plus whatever other data the search engine has from other tracking and data-mining sources).

Of course much of one's online profile may be already linked with one's RW identity, but the self-Googling may add some previously semi-anonymous data to the profile.

If you're worried about this, use an incognito window to search for your name. Its a good idea anyway, because it turns off personalization.

I googled my name and found 57 others with the same name... None of those 57 names were mine though.

It doesn't matter if you don't find yourself, as long as your search term (your name) matched. So as long as some one knows your name (and that you might Google yourself), there is a good chance you'd see it.

Similar in my case. Were most of the 57 just blogs, Facebook/Linkedin, company pages etc.? You could gain similar ranking by putting something out there. It is a good position to be in control. Maybe add a middle intial to be distinctive.

My name is entirely unique, I've never found a reference to anyone else but myself when I google my own name. Thankfully, the references are relatively good/professional, but it's still a bit disconcerting.

I google myself all the time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbk4Bvic5jA

A bit late to the party here, but if you want to help non-technical people manage their personal SEO, Brand Yourself [1] is a pretty cool startup that helps with this.

[1] http://brandyourself.com/

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