In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online.
Some of the "un-Googleables" say being crowded out of search results actually carries a professional and financial price. That's because people increasingly rely on search engines to find things they want to read, music they want to hear, people and companies they want to do business with.
U.S. Internet users conduct hundreds of millions of search queries daily. About 7% of all searches are for a person's name, estimates search engine Ask.com. More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet. Nearly 40% of individuals have used search engines to look up friends or acquaintances with whom they'd lost touch, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN unit.
Professional networking site LinkedIn Corp. says its members' profile pages often turn up high in Google search results when the users opt to make the pages accessible to the public. "Any time you can distinguish yourself with a distinctive name or a distinctive characteristic that sticks out in people's minds, that's going to be the best solution," says Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2007