Do You Google Your Kid’s Name Before They’re Born

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today about people who have to deal with having a bad Google footprint. It talks about a woman who had many Google results (due to a unique last name), important for her published research papers, and then got married. She changed her name (to her husband’s common last name, Wilson), and as a result people can’t find her anymore, and certainly not her important research.
It begs the question: What the hell are you supposed to do? My wife got married and changed her name, and her old last name was very unique (full name Google results: 1,600). She has the top six Google results for her name, albeit most of those times I mentioned her. Her new last name increases the Google results for her name 100-fold, to 111,000, although she still has the top two […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg