Have you ever Googled your name just to see what comes up? Come on, we all have. I’ve got it pretty easy since there aren’t all that many Zamrycki’s in the world.
The truth is that I Google myself every few months just to see what footprints I’ve left on the web recently. I don’t bother with the ‘Joshua’ bit. I just Google ‘Zamrycki’ and about 75% of the results are usually about me. But this last time was a little freaky…
The first page of results was pretty normal: my blog always comes up first and is usually followed by info about any plays or films I’ve been involved in, any comments I’ve left on other people’s blogs, a couple pages that my sister has visited, and a photo of my dad’s softball team from 1975.
The second page turned up a possible distant relative named Adam Zamrycki from Warsaw who won some sort of award on a Polish MTV site (we’re famous!). The rest of the results were more blog comments, my volleyball team, or entertainment sites where my name appears.
Now the third page of results is where things started to freak me out. All of the results up till now had the word ‘Zamrycki’ somewhere on the page. Obviously, right? I did a search for the word ‘Zamrycki’. That is how search engines are supposed to work. Or is it? A whole batch of pages popped up where the word ‘Zamrycki’ does not appear:
- Sinus infection symptoms
- Eye sty resources
- Cat carrier bargains
- Reading CAT scan resources
- Wicked witch costumes
- Kitchen magnets
- Ceiling lasers
- Cigarettes and chocolate milk
- Sweet Georgia Brown information
- Wild bachelor party pictures
- Dead father wedding songs
As far as I can tell, no Zamrycki had anything to do with any of the above pages. The strange thing is that I have mentioned all of these things in my blog at one point or another in the past two years (except for Dead father wedding songs, I swear). But why would all of these pages appear under a search for ‘Zamrycki’? Does Google assume that the content of my blog is synonymous with the word ‘Zamrycki’? If so, does that mean that anyone who Googles the word ‘elephant’ will find pages about high school because the first result in an ‘elephant search’ is the official page for Elephant The Movie which mentions high school? My brain hurts.