Ego surfing
Huh, apparently lots of people ego surf (i.e. google their own name). It's come up twice in the last day or so for me: Scalzi is giving it up for Lent, and a particular asshole on Twitter got (beautifully) mocked for it when he replied to someone who mentioned him by name but didn't @-tag him.
I suppose if I were famous(ish) I might do it, too, but honestly it never occurs to me.
Every once in a while, like maybe twice a year, I do it just to see what comes up in the googlemachine if someone were looking for me. What I learn is that the best thing about having a very common first name and a moderately common last name is that there are lots of other folks in the world with my name, and some of them work hard to get internet eyeballs.
I'm thrilled that they attract those eyeballs instead of me. :)
My most common online handles (Barbarienne and --E) are funny. Barbarienne is the name of an erotic? X-rated? porny? comic book. (My uncertainty is because I've never read it. This is pretty much a "I gather the content is sexual in nature" sort of inference from the google listings.) I don't know when the comic began, but I've had this handle online since the late 90s, and anyone with a brain would see that this blog and my Twitter posts have nothing to do with the comic.
(I kind of want to get some of them, though, for shits and grins.)
The handle "--E" is obviously unsearchable. Those hyphens make Google choke, and the letter is the most common one in the English language, so, yeah, not useful. (Mostly it points you to the E! Entertainment Network.)
Which comes down to, even if I were famous(ish), I'm not certain it would do any good to ego surf, anyway. There are an actress, a marketing person, and a media consultant with the same name, so you can imagine how they vie to dominate the search results. There's also a yoga studio owner and a rather sweet looking elderly lady who is smiling in all her pictures, surrounded by family.
On the other plus side, when I google the pseud I intend to adopt for any published works going forward, I get zilch. So I really ought to run out and claim the domain names and so on.