What's your Google number?
Thanks to Stowe Boyd's blog that points to an interesting article by Valdis Krebs on quantifying the number of results that show up when you Google someone's name.
OK, OK, I know you can’t wait. Go to www.google.com and enter your name within double quotes. If you spell your name several ways put each of them in double quotes separated by an OR. I put the following string into the Google search box: “Valdis Krebs” OR “Valdis E. Krebs”. Once you have all of the spellings of your name entered and separated by OR, click the “Google Search” button. Quickly you will see another page listing all of the web pages that contain your name. At the top of the page will be a blue line. At the far right of the blue line Google will report how many total pages it found with your name on it. The total pages found is your Google number. If you have a very common name, such as “John Smith” you will get many false positives – your Google number will be overstated. Retrieve your runaway ego. Also, if you have a name shared by well known people – Barry Bonds – your results will be inflated. You can eliminate the hits for your famous name twin by asking Google to specifically not return pages with specific terms like “baseball” or “home run”. You do this by putting a dash in front of the term: –“home run”.