Google geeking.

[baratron]

There's currently a meme going round whereby you type into Google "[your first name] is" and then use this to gather up a list of who/what you are - or rather, who/what a load of people with the same name as you are, e.g.

Richard is also an author of three, original Battlestar Galactica novels
Richard is a knight to remember.
Richard is halfway through the Masters' program in education and counseling at Providence College in Rhode Island.

Well, I can't do it for myself. There is no way using Google to search for people who have the same name as me. Google doesn't distinguish between people who have "Helen" and "Louise" among their names and people who have "helen-louise" as a single name.

I understand full well that people looking for "mother-in-law" might also want pages containing "mother in law", but I'm not using the hyphen as a phrase connector - I'm using it as a fundamental part of the name. I'd like some way of distinguishing between optional and obligatory hyphens.

I actually emailed Google about this almost a year ago, and they never got back to me. Perhaps I should send the mail again?

Comments

[mjl]

hmm... tricky. google can't do case sensitive stuff - I guess all that stuff gets dropped for the indexing. but they could probably search for the two words next to each other and than filter the results based on the punctuation...

looking down the
list of "helen louise"s manually, there's:
Helen-Louise Hunter is presently retired from the US Government, concentrating
on the publication of several other books

and then the next hyphenated Helen-Louise in the list is actually you... browsing through the first few pages, the only hyphenated Helen-Louises are you (your site, IC stuff, wildhearts stuff) and that Helen-Louise Hunter person. guess you don't share your name with many people... :) you could try with one of the other names you've used on the net or something if you wanted...

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Personally, I keep cracking up at "Helen Louise is a beautiful 20 year old from Lancashire. She is 5'9" tall and her measurements are 32A/24/33. She has blonde hair and beautiful big hazel eyes." Yeah, that sounds like me - not!

No, I don't share my name with many people - there are lots of Ann-Maries and Sarah-Louises and Emma-Janes, but hardly any Helen-Louises. I was actually going to be a Sarah-Louise, but Sarah was a ridiculously popular name in 1976. I was born on a Monday night, and my dad went to the registrars sometime on Tuesday afternoon to register the birth. Apparently the woman there said "Oh, not another Sarah, that's the 20th this week" and on the spur of the moment he decided to change my name. Apparently my mother was rather pissed off about this!

[geminigirl]

I love child-naming stories...perhaps because I have such a traumatic naming experience.

google searches

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

My pet gripe with Google is that it doesn't understand formatting notation. So if I want to search for LaTeX stuff then I get lots of unhelpful hits.

But it's great otherwise.

[meeping.livejournal.com]

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