Have you ever googled your own name?
Search engines are becoming a more common tool to find information about people. Someone could be searching for you right now. It could be a potential employer, your current employer, an old friend, an old classmate, a date or a journalist. What will they find? Here are some tips and tricks to take control of what they will find.

Your name
If you have a very common name like “Jens Hansen” (sorry to all the people named Jens Hansen for calling your name common) you might not be of risk in respect to people finding information about you that they shouldn’t. There are 167,000 hits when searching on Google. But only 1,460 hits on “Jens Ole Hansen”. So the more uncommon your name is, the more likely it is that people will find information about you.

How to Google your name
Go to http://www.google.com/ and enter your full name. Remember to put your name in quotation marks “name”.
All search engines work differently, so make sure also to check your name on http://www.yahoo.com/. http://www.ask.com/ and http://www.msn.com/.

Domain name
Register your name .com or .dk to make sure that information posted is controlled by you. And to all you people with uncommon and unique names, who always have to spell your name for others, congratulations you have a big chance that your name is not already taken. Check your name for availability at http://www.speednames.com/ (Danish company).

Post your information online
If you have a website you can enter your information there, but you might find that it does not rank as high on the search list as you would want it to. Good sites for making your information make it to the top of the search lists are http://www.zoominfo.com/ and http://www.linkedin.com/.

Keep your personal life personal
If you have a website where you post pictures of your family and friends, then make it a rule not to mention last names. I once googled one of my former colleagues to find out what he was doing now and found a bunch of pictures of him and his friends totally drunk at a party. These pictures where posted not by him but by one of his friends. This was not done with bad intentions by his friend, but these are the same pictures that a potential employer or customer would find. So, no last names. This also goes for naming files/pictures uploaded to the Internet.

Know when your name is posted on the Internet
With Google Alerts or Yahoo Alerts you can get e-mail alerts every time your name is found by these search engines on the Internet. The service is free and only requires you to generate a profile.

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