It came in the mailbox
Miss Doran…I just googled my name just to see if anyone could ever find me and while I think you must be a super person and very talented, I gave up at page 26. There were many more pages but I’m pretty sure they would be filled with what’s on the last 26 pages. I’m actually speechless to find that there is abslalutly no room for any other persons with the same name on the face of the earth to be found on the first 26 pages …but you. You must have some serious web site agent who promotes you to where there is no room for any one else. By the way, my maiden name is EDIT…there is a Colleen EDIT who is a writer… and the same is with her. She has filled up numerous pages, just like you with everything about her to where there is not one mention of myself who shares the same name also. My facebook is under EDIT which helps people find me who know me only by my maiden name and only find me by my married name. But they will never find me on google. Have a good day.
Methinks someone doesn’t know how the internet works.
There’s some guy named Neil Gaiman in Peoria who curses the day Neil Gaiman wrote a comic book.
Thanks for the laughs, Colleen.
If you’re anything like that poor Colleen Doran who lives in Virginia Beach who used to get cards, letters, and phone calls meant for me, well, I bet she doesn’t like me much, either.
Abslalutly.
I never thought “John Platt” was a common name until I googled myself. Now I know of dozens of others sharing my name. (But I still usually come up first or second… heh heh.)
I thought this letter came from a kid. Unlike the lady in question, my webfu is mighty. She is older than I am. So, not a kid.
Anyway, maybe she was trying to be funny. I thought it was funny.
Maybe not.
There’s apparently another Kevin Carrier who plays washboard in a zydeco band. I wish I was that cool.
That is pretty cool!
I don’t get it.
(I used to not like my name, when I was in grade school. Now, professionally, everyone recognizes me. I guess the trick is to be recognized for the right reasons. And thank god I have a unique name… I don’t have to deal with mistaken identities at the airport.)
I think she really believes I have used my amazing power over Google to manipulate the search engine results. And we all know what a big Google fan I am.
That anyone could be so um…ill informed as to believe that, I dunno, her marriage announcement or something would fire her right to the top of Google: I’m in awe of how clueless people are.
I did a search on the maiden name she complains about. Her web fu is not mighty. There were dozens of Colleens to be found in just a few pages, and the main search result was for a photographer, not a writer.
I think I just got someone’s internet tantrum.
It’s amusing, but wow.
Priceless! The ranking metrics within search engines can sometimes skew things but not to be blunt, some people are just more important than others and those with fanbases and/or notoriety will be pushed up in the search results.
Out of a weird curiosity, I did search my name and fortunately not too much shows up that actually belongs to me. I don’t have it enabled in Facebook for my page to show up so the results that do show up with my name (which astonishingly is shared by more people than I would have thought) won’t have my actual page.
Other than a few things work-related, my comicartfans gallery page and one or two other things, I’m mostly off the radar – which is fine by me.
I never liked my first name when I was younger (children are ever so “kind” after all) but I’ve learned to accept it and mainly use my full name for work (and with my grandmother) but otherwise, it’s usually some shorthand, depending on the situation and circle of people.
I am not sure why not being easily found on Google is issue for an individual. Sure, if you are a business or operate one, then it matters. And as you said, if you really wanted to show up on the first page you could. I did google my own name and I guess I must have the same web agent you do as only me showed up in the searches.
Actually like Torsten, I do have a unique combination of first and last names.
The White Pages listings said there were only 32 people in the US with the same last name and I know most of them and they are all related to me in some way.
But as I mentioned, I don’t know if it’s a good thing.
Anyway, it is amusing that someone would think that you were deliberately trying to fill up the google search pages.
I have this cartoon image of you grabbing google pages off you computer screen and holding them to your chest while chortling “mine! mine! all mine!’
Well aren’t we all just glad our names aren’t Rob Granito?
My plans for world domination continue apace!
#1: corner the market on MY NAME!
CHECK!
Oh, my.
It appears the Colleen Doran who wrote me today to complain about my Google dominance had a previous address in VA Beach.
The same one who used to get letters and phone calls intended for me? That might explain the annoyance.
For added snaps and giggles, there is a Colleen Doran in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Oh, my, indeed!
One of those mistaken annoying phone calls was from me.
Sorry again, other Colleen!
Shame on you for taking up all those pages! Leave room for someone else on the internet, ya web hog!
Ahhhh, it’s good to laugh and every good joke has a victim.
I google myself every few months, just to see what I can find.
There is 1 other Jamie Coville. He’s a guitarist for a rock band (or was, I think). Lives in New York. Sadly I am not him.
My “business” name Doug E. Shirts comes up first for me (yay!). My real name, Douglas Edwards, is the same as the late CBS reporter and Evening News anchor before Cronkite. At least he was famous. I’m glad that my Google ranking is not beat by a genealogy listing from 1839.
While I turn up a fair bit in Google (and I get Google Alert notices when a new hit turns up), I am cursed to share a name with the chairman of the Montgomery County (PA) Republican Committee.
Which annoys me considerably, since I concur wholeheartedly with George Washington on the dangers of political parties to democracy.
I’m occasionally moved to comment on his activities on various forums, so he may be aware of me.
But I was here first. You can find email and other writings of mine going back to the mid-1970′s.
I also have Google Alerts set up on my immediate family. (We all have different last names). My wife gets a fair number of hits in places like IMdB for her professional work, but she also shares her name with a prominent academic psychologist. One daughter (now adult) shares a name with a famous figure skater, but the other has a name which I’m reasonably confident is unique.
For kicks, I replicated the search for your name, though I didn’t run it out to 26 pages. Most impressive! But behind the impressive search results, it’s plain you’ve worked hard at your career. That’s the sort of lesson I’d like to convey to my kids.
Sorry about the delay with your post, Bob. Newbies’s first comments get held for moderation. After,y ou shouldn’t have a problem posting.
Even with the confusion with the phonecalls, I don’t understand her annoyance at the Google search results. My maiden name, even with the confusion with a male actor with a slightly different spelling and the combination of two Stargate characters names, comes up more often than I really expected. Someone has archived a lot of the old FIDOnet BBS logs and I ping up with some of that.
My married name comes up with pages and pages of a hat style! I guess I’m going to have to tell my husband that it’s over. I can’t have his last name- I’ll never be able to Google my name and find myself with it! ;-P
A) She really doesn’t understand how the internet works.
B) She thinks I have conspired to squeeze every other Colleen Doran out of search results. She’d better be glad her name’s not Jeff Smith.
C) She may be a bit of a…gentle nonconformist. Because no one in possession of themselves writes letters like this to total strangers.
My assistant wrote a very polite letter explaining in a few short sentences that Google ranks searches based on popularity and that this is not the work of my evil web site agent. Whatever the hell that is.
No response.
And I’m only guessing this was the same Colleen Doran who lived in VA Beach who used to get annoying phone calls and letters for me.
Colleen Doran is not a common name, so I’ve had a few problems as well. About six years ago, a collection agency came looking for a Colleen Doran who owed a lot of money. It wasn’t me. I began getting her bills. I even got a letter from a private detective asking about the names of my sisters and parents.
I don’t have any sisters and those weren’t the names of my parents. And I’ve never been to Las Vegas.
When I called the collection agency about the matter, they told me that they simply sent the bills to anyone they could find with the same name in hopes of finding the Colleen Doran who owed them money. I didn’t even know that was legal. Or is it?
I was told to tear up the mail, and I never heard from them again.
That was a joke… While us “Torstens” are legion (there’s a Wikipedia page, and we have a nimipäivä in Finland, but no saints), there aren’t many in the U.S. (but JERAMY, JEWEL, and LAUREN each make up .004% of the U.S. male population… WTH?) , and, as far as I can tell, none with my combination.
http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.male.first
There’s actually another Jeff Smith (Wikipedia shows 16) who writes cookbooks (The Frugal Gourmet) and another who writes how-to photography books.
Flashing forward to page 50 of Google search…
You’re a CIA executive chef in Boulder, Colorado. And you married the bakery owner. Congratulations!
On page 75, the last page sans duplicates, you claim every link. Mighty web fu? Or spiteful gluttony preventing lesser Colleens from appearing?
Intelius shows 65 “Colleen Dorans” in the U.S., including 12 “Colleen M. Dorans”.
According to the U.S. Census, “Doran” ranks at #1961, with .006%.
“Colleen” ranks #227 among women, with .092%.
That means…
0.000552 * 311,166,329 = 171,763.814 “Colleen Dorans” (I guess the 0.814th is still in vitro.)
If the female ranking is just for the female population, then there are about 85 thousand other “Colleen Dorans” in the country which you have yet to hear from! Wow! You should organize! Imagine the political clout!
My spiteful gluttony is a force to be reckoned with! HAH! I rule the web.
The math has got to be way off. There aren’t more than a few hundred Colleen Dorans in the USA that I could find. And thanks to my angry Colleen correspondent, I went looking!
If there are actually 85,000 with the same name, Intelius would certainly have more than 65 listings.
BTW, for the curious, don’t go looking for me online. I no longer keep property under my own name. The addresses or identities you will dig up won’t be mine. What you will find is some lady and her angry husband, wondering why you’re calling.
Yes, the math is off – the calculation is
0.006/100 * 0.092/100 * 311,166,329 =17.176. So if women were 50% of the population and names were combined randomly, there would be only 8.5 Colleen Dorans.
*
Miki Wins!
*cough* Torsten is not a Finnish name.. so no celebrational day. Torsti is the Finnish equalent and since we’re still officially a bilingual country, the Swedish Torsten is placed on the same day as Torsti; 27th of February… er.. yeah. Sorry. Carry on. *cough*
It’s pretty cool to be called Thor’s “hammer” though.
Looks like you’re not the only creator this happens to:
http://troyhickman.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-troy-hickman-will-hereafter-stop.html
Well, at least it’s nothing personal! Whew! I thought I was the True North for Teh Crazy there for awhile.
Ouch. My sympathies for getting the complaint. Though yeah, really? She doesn’t know how things work.
I haven’t googled myself in a while, but I know I come out high on “Sarah Beach” (and of course “ScribblerWorks”). And I admit to “gaming” it a bit, by having my website in my signature on a couple of message boards where I’ve posted a lot. Since my name is in the meta codes for the website that helps the high ranking.
But seriously, I needed to do it. I know of at least five other “Sarah Beach”es online, and at least three of them are also writer/artists. Got make as many breaks as I can.