OddThinking

A person’s name is Google-unique if searching for the name in Google reveals only results only about that person, and no-one else. (In fact, it should be true of any search engine, but Google has the cultural mind-share at the moment.)

Google-uniqueness (like telephone-directory-uniqueness) is a blessing and a curse: on the upside, people can find you and your web-sites, and on the downside people can find you and your web-sites.

Upon thinking about this, I made three predictions:

• Parents are already considering Google-uniqueness when naming a child – or at the least checking that there is no horrific backstory to a (potential) namesake of the child.
• There will be cases of people changing their names to Google-unique ones.
• There will be (a small number of) cases in the next twenty years of people changing their names not to hide from the police, not to escape their former family, but to evade their Google history. There is already a history of people changing their names to separate themselves from namesakes, but this is to separate themselves from their own history.

The act of writing them down has made me realise these predictions are hardly profound.

People already change their name to unique names. A friend from Melbourne changed his legal name to match his stage-name: Mr Wobbly – surprisingly still not Google-unique! I also recall from my childhood reading about a couple who changed their names to “Whoya Kidding?” and “R. U. Kidding?” – question marks and all.

People already change their names to escape their pasts.

Web-searching hasn’t started a trend here, my predictions are just that it has added more pressure to it.