Parents Want Unique Names for Baby to Increase Googleability

Remember the Chinese couple who wanted to name their baby "@"?

Turns out there’s a trend of giving babies unique names to increase their "Googleability":

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. (See search results.)

For people prone to vanity searching — punching their own names into search engines — absence from the first pages of search results can bring disappointment. On top of that, some of the "un-Googleables" say being crowded out of search results actually carries a professional and financial price.

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