Parents Want Unique Names for Baby to Increase Googleability

Posted by Alex in Baby & Kids, Blog & Internet on August 19, 2007 at 1:40 am


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.

Link – via collision detection


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COMMENT

8 comments to "Parents Want Unique Names for Baby to Increase Googleability"

  1. John
    August 19th, 2007 at 2:49 am

    See, the problem with having a high googleability is that if they DO find stuff about you, they might not like what they see.

    It'd be pretty easy to find a pornstar named @.

  2. Andy
    August 19th, 2007 at 3:55 am

    I pretty sure you cant search google for the @ symbol. But I think they've shot themselves in the foot because if you could im sure its would return more results than most names! Also online forms and databases usually validate to not allow symbols in names, that kids life is gonna be spent mostly buried in red tape.

  3. Cuimhne
    August 19th, 2007 at 7:11 am

    I just googled myself (first time!) and I couldn't find myself.... When I use just my first and last name I get some woman who does business management and has published a couple of books. When I use my middle name I get no hits at all :( Oh well, I don't really use my real name online very much!

  4. Bryan
    August 19th, 2007 at 10:30 am

    I'm kind of glad that my name is so common it returns millions of hits.
    How long before somebody names their kid "Neatorama?"

  5. Callista
    August 19th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    My daughter's name doesn't return to many hits but that's certainly not WHY I chose it! (Alastrin)

  6. L
    August 19th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    Alastrin? When I Googled that, I found a type of smallpox.

    I'm sure she'll love that name when she's older.

  7. Alex
    August 20th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    Alastrin sounds straight out of a Harry Potter book!

  8. Jacki
    August 23rd, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    My name (Jacqueline) was randomly chosen after my parents realized I wasn't a boy lol. Even with my last name, I'm ungooglable. My older sister has a googleable name with just her first name. : (


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