Tim's tweet last week about finding himself during a vanity search sparked my curiosity - what would a similar search for my own name reveal about me? I should be upfront and tell you that this isn't my first vanity search. I vaguely remember typing my name into the Google search bar a few years ago to see if there were any other "Catherine Caughell"s out there. It turns out that there were only two, both born in the 1800s and they are long since deceased, so it's possible that I'm the only living person with this name.
Anyway, the only results I remember that came up pertaining to me was an OHASSTA reference and a broken link to a project that I did in my OAC chemistry class back in 2002. With that in mind, I was curious to see how my electronic footprint had changed over the last few years.
Here's a list of what comes up when you Google my name now:
- A lesson plan containing a virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau that I created in my first teacher's block and posted on the OHASSTA (Ontario History and Social Sciences Teachers' Association) website two years ago.
- My Blogger User Profile
- Minutes from a GLTBQ Youth Advisory Committee Meeting that I attended as part of my extracurricular responsibilities during my first teaching block. The meeting was part of the research that the school's guidance counselor and myself were doing in consideration of setting up a GLTBQ support group in the high school.
- Entries from my blog The Perpetual Student
- Room and bus confirmation for a cultural excursion I went on in South Korea
- Links to comments I posted on Dana and Tasha's blogs
- my name on a list of PhD and MA students currently enrolled in the History Department at UWO
- Description and results of an experiment I did in high school as part of an ISU
- A thank you for a minor contribution I made to The Brock Press a few years ago
I was completely surprised by all of the new links my search turned up. In the last two years, my presence on the web (or at least in Google's search results) has skyrocketed. Instead of only a few small references buried underneath a mile-long list of unrelated 'Catherine' or 'Caughell' results, I am now the top search result for my name. And thankfully, my increased exposure didn't come about as a result of being tagged in dozens of embarassing Facebook photos; the majority of them are evidence of the electronic footprint that I've been making professionally over the last few years, something that I'd be happy for any employer to see. I look forward to all the ways that the rest of our public history year will allow me to continue to make my mark on the world wide web.
As a side note, it's also interesting to see Google search results at work. Three different types of results came up attached to my blog - my user profile, example blog posts and comments that I have left on other people's blogs. I'm sure that all of these results were broken down into separate elements and pushed forward because Blogger is powered by Google and I used the Google engine for my search. (Running a similar search in the Yahoo! engine, the only blog result that comes up is the main page, itself.)
