When I Googled Myself....

When I Googled myself the first entries that came up were for an attorney in Ohio who happened to have exactly the same name as me. There were also a number of LinkedIn and Facebook pages that showed up that were also not me. Not until I ventured onto the second page of the search did I come across links that actually referenced me. These website belonged to a professional affiliation of mine - the Connecticut Chapter of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists, a group in which I am currently the secretary.

            From my searching I found out that there are a large number of people with the exact same name as me. I was determined to find more websites referencing me specifically. I experimented with keywords. I am a chemist and many of my affiliations both professional and extracurricular involve chemistry, so I added the search words "chemist" and "chemistry" in addition to my name [Luisa Taddeo chemist]. This yielded a lot more results for my name, including many references from my undergraduate career.

            My Facebook and LinkedIn accounts were not searchable through Google as I have blocked them through security preferences. However, when I Bing-ed my name, my Facebook was the first link to show up with all the previous links mentioned above following it. At this point I continued to refine the keywords, and put my name with the keyword "CT" [Luisa Taddeo CT] and on the first page of Google results I saw my name on the website mylife.com. I continued to this website where I found myself as a first entry with a town I used to live in and my exact age. There was advertisement to create an account in order to search my further. I clicked on it and saw that this site gathered and displayed the names of all the towns I’ve lived in within the area and promised more information about me, but for a fee.