Google index and me

I have been googling my name a few times in the last days. What I have discovered is that the google index can tell much about me, and yet tell nothing.

First item on the agenda is the fluctuations, every day the results are quite different, one day my linkedin profile was on top, another day it was a post I once made on the Zebra mailing lists and another day it was some site called marketvisual (more on that later).

Second item is the totally useless stuff, although its quite cheering to know that there are a few hattrick players named after me (virtual soccer players , not real people) I doubt that those results really deserve their location, I guess hattrick should have probably prevented spiders on those pages. There are also some name poachers on the list, I already mentioned marketvisual and would gladly add lookupanyone which believes there's a me in NJ. Any other auto generated database which contains my name is probably useless, as they normally add very little information and sometimes even wrong information with regards to who I am, what I do and who I know.

Third item is the freshness issue, it is quite difficult to know who I really am when my past and present are tightly mixed. You'll find my software contributions of the long past interlaced with my recent activities and events I have been through. It would have been really cool if there was a way to create a timeline and put the search results on it, so one will know that I wrote the renegade utils about 10 years before writing the google toolbar button or filing some gentoo bugs.

Last item on the agenda is the black hole, many items of my activities were logged to the net on the past, however - those are unavailable today (probably just removed) which actually creates a preference to some sort of activities, many other things will never be seen (for example surfree and kerenix times pages).

However, googling yourself or beloved ones is a fun activity, you can do this and compare the results with yourself and see if the picture stands true. Atleast in my case the picture is mostly true, although shot from a unique angle...