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htm PAGE ONE You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well Abigail L Garvey Wilson Emerges From Obscurity; Page A1 Before Abigail Garvey got married in 2000, anyone could easily Google her. Then she swapped her maiden name for her husband's last name, Wilson, and dropped out of sight. In Web-search results for her new name, links to Ms Wilson's epidemiology research papers became lost among all manner of other Abigail Wilsons, ranging from 1980s newspaper wedding announcements for various Abigail Wilsons to genealogy records listing Abigail Wilsons born in the 1600s and 1700s. When Ms Wilson applied for a new job, interviewers questioned the publications she listed on her rsum because they weren't finding the publications in online searches, Ms Wilson says.
Her top choice: Kohler, an old family name that had the key, rare distinction of being uncommon on the Web when paired with Wilson. "Justin and I wanted our son's name to be as special as he is," she explains. In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves -- or their offspring -- to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites' member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that's becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type "John Smith" into Google's search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results.
On top of that, some of the "un-Googleables" say being crowded out of search results actually carries a professional and financial price. That's because people increasingly rely on search engines to find things they want to read, music they want to hear, people and companies they want to do business with. US Internet users conduct hundreds of millions of search queries daily. More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet. Boosting Visibility Some people have taken measures to boost their visibility online, including creating listings in professional directories and paying companies to help them appear more prominently in search results. Parents-to-be routinely plug baby names into search engines to scout out the online competition. Some actors and musicians weigh the impact of less unique stage names. That's the case for a Los Angeles singer-songwriter who in 2003 abandoned his given name and began going by his initials, "AM." At the time, he was launching a solo career and hoped the approach might help him stand out.
StartupJournal: Generic Company Names Get Lost in Web Searches 2/13/07 But even as AM began to experience some success, he soon realized that fans had trouble finding him on the Web. Google returned an estimated 23 billion results for "AM" -- ranging from American Greetings Corp. com -- but no links to the long-haired LA singer within at least the first 20 pages.
AM singer) AM titled a first self-released album "AM" -- which didn't help. "How much bad luck can a guy have when he's just blindly coming up with his image and he has no idea what the impact will be down the line?" AM believes the difficulty people had finding him using Google cost him fans and sales. "If you can't find the guy in a couple of minutes, you're going to give up." Yesterday, AM's site suddenly began appearing on the first page of Google search results -- he says he has no idea why. Searching for "Jason Smith" using Google recently turned up an estimated 36 million results, with none of the top ones leading to Jason Smith the 36-year-old software researcher at IBM's Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY Even adding Mr Smith's employer "IBM" or his graduate school "University of North Carolina," or its initials "UNC," doesn't help much. So a number of years back, Mr Smith began using the initials of his middle name, McColm, to stand apart.
But there are still lots of people who don't realize they need to add that. Prominent Placement Some people in similar straits have used services that can help generate more prominent placement for them in search results. Krishna De, a personal branding and marketing consultant in Dublin, signed up with Ziggs Inc. in 2005 after she left a corporate career and set out on her own. At the time, results for the Hindu deity Krishna crowded out links to her site. "If you're not found in search results, people start to wonder why," says Ziggs CEO Tim DeMello.
says its members' profile pages often turn up high in Google search results when the users opt to make the pages accessible to the public. Marquis Who's Who, whose print directories were a go-to place for finding important people in pre-search-engine days, says it has been testing a service where individuals can search its online database of more than 13 million people, paying on a per-search basis. "Any time you can distinguish yourself with a distinctive name or a distinctive characteristic that sticks out in people's minds, that's going to be the best solution," says Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer. That's advice parents like Ms Wilson have already taken to heart. Her husband rejected her original choice for their son, "Kohler," on the grounds that it would subject him to playground ridicule. "I gave up trying to find a one-of-a-kind name and decided that as long as he did not share the name with a serial killer, I would settle," Ms Wilson explains.
And recently she has been running names through search engines in anticipation of the arrival of her second child, a daughter due at the end of this month. Stella Wilson seemed to do the trick -- a Google search turned up relatively few results -- but her husband shot it down.
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