What's Your SL Name-To-RL Name Google Search Ratio?

So here's a fun if disconcerting exercise:  Google your Second Life avatar's name, and be sure to put it in quotes.  Note the number of Results you get.  Now do the same with your real life name (also in quotes) and tally those Results, as well.  Which number is larger?  Marvelous Second Life blogger Kit Meredith did that recently, and though she's an IP lawyer in real life, discovered that far as Google is concerned, her avatar is more popular than her.  ("The really interesting results," says Kit, "are the ones where you find your name being dropped in discussions that you’re not a part of.") This is part of a larger trend, as Kit notes, with avatar identities infecting music social networks, Flickr, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 sites.  (Forseti Svarog points us to an analyst's unifying term for the phenomenon:  "Generation V".)  But somehow the effect seems most jarring, at least to me, when it shows up in the ultimate search engine.  Google being the world mind and all.   

As for me, Google's ratio of "Wagner James Au" to "Hamlet Au" results is roughly four to one.  But then, most search hits on my real name are related in some way to my SL identity, so I'd call that a wash.

How about you?  Take the Google challenge and post your ratio in Comments.

Update, 5/10:  Bumped.  Of the 19 readers who've posted the results of this experiment in Comments so far, 11 have Second Life avatar names which Google more than their real life names.

Update, 5/12:  Of 34 Residents now reporting, 20 say their avatars Google more often than them.

Comments

[Laetizia Coronet]

That's 3940 for the real me and 3350 for the avatar. But the first hits on my real name are from someone with the same name - I do not run a media consultancy. So let's call it a draw.

[Ravishal Bentham]

A total of 784 hits for my avie. My RL name produced 55 hits of which only 3 of them are me. Seems there is an IT professional and a Rugby player with my name too.

[CyFishy Traveler]

CyFishy Traveler -- 1770

Real Name -- 1590, but nothing about me shows up until, I think, page six of the results.

I recently Googled the words "cyfishy" and "newbie" (not in quotes together) and found that my little Newbie Page was on what appeared to be a syllabus for a college course that was using Second Life as a venue! *boggle* I'm on a syllabus . . . dang.

[Phar Hand]

1220 hits for my avatar, 820 for my RL name ... and almost none of the RL hits are related to me. hell must i be famous in SL *LOL*

[Daman Tenk]

2870 for my avatar

3480 for my real name (though I share my name with a world class inline skater and a Belgian journalist. Only few hits refer to me)

2530 for my regular internet nickname

[Otenth Paderborn]

SL: 3,360 (many duplicates, I noticed glancing through a few pages)

RL: 1,040, not all me, of course. While I'm the first result, the first page also includes a fugitive the state of Connecticut is looking for.

[Kit Meredith]

Hi Hamlet, glad you found the post interesting, thanks for linking. Hopefully others will enjoy it too.

Oh - I know! Let's tack a "now tag five of your friends to Google themselves" requirement onto the end of it, and we'll call it a "meme"! The Google Ratio Meme! ;)

[Vidal Tripsa]

My digital puppetty self scores 2060 with, thankfully, a whole first page of just me on Google UK's listing. My fleshy puppetty self, however, scores 16000, though only gets specific mention from result #19.

I thought both names were pretty uncommon and difficult to find, but... just goes to show: there are too few Tripsas in this world!

[Tateru Nino]

42:1 for me, plus change.

[Princess Ivory]

Only 2 hits on my RL name that were actually me. (and two that weren't). That is all that came up.

My SL name generated too many pages to count. I stopped after 25 hits, 12 pages into the results. They were mostly related to my posts on other people's blogs. And I had no idea how frequently "Princess Ivory" was used for wedding dresses and china patterns!

Princess Ivory

[Keystone Bouchard]

7,300 for SL: Keystone Bouchard
4,380 for RL: Jon Brouchoud

I started to notice this shift when I posted baby videos on YouTube and pics on Flickr. 10 to 1 the congrats came to Keystone, not Jon.

My real-life family keeps asking, "wtf is Keystone Bouchard?"

[Maleficent Munster]

5,490 for real me and 7 for SL me. LMAO! Of course, I've only been in SL since December and my blog has only been up for a couple weeks.

[Rusalka Writer]

RL: 525 (weird name, nearly all me)
SL: 225

Phew.

[Cyn Vandeverre]

Real me: 7,890
Avatar: 2,220

[Dedric Mauriac]

RL: Lewis Moten - 8,570
SL: Dedric Mauraic - 49,800

It seems to be close to a six to one ratio.

5.8109684947491248541423570595099

[Miriel Enfield]

RL: 27 (only about three of them are actually me, and the rest don't seem to be actual names)

SL: 2,970

[Erbo Evans]

RL: 26,900...but there seems to be a realtor in Pennsylvania with the same name as me, and maybe a couple other people as well.

SL: 2,800, and a lot more "representative" items offered by Google in the initial search results (128 vs. 56). Of course, now I use the "Erbo Evans" name in EVE Online, too...and searching for "Erbo" would probably turn up more stuff from me than searching for my real name, because I've used "Erbo" as a handle online for nearly two decades.

[Forsythe Whitfield]

I have two RL numbers, the first is 1510 for my given name. the 2nd is 2310 for my stage name (I'm a musician in RL). Interestingly enough my avatar name comes up 2650 so it beats them both.

[Marianne McCann]

SL me: 11,100 hits. All but the top hit on the main page returns information relating to my avatar.

RL me: 3,150 for full name (all the main page links are me), 20,600 for first and last name only. More than half the main page is me.

[Moriash Moreau]

RL - 6740 Hits.
SL - 1340 Hits.

Strangely enough, all those SL hits are about me. In RL, I share my name with a college basketball player, a singer, an actor, an online security consultant, and a dozen others. Not so much of the fame in RL. I am gratified that Google still first-ranks me (or at least my web representations) in both personas, though. Go me!

[Patchouli Woollahra]

RL - 17 hits
SL - 2430 hits

To put it further in perspective, the oldest reference to my RL self dates back to 1995 when I was still a game-crazed little kid hanging out in a shop that was all about pirated games on 286 and 386s.

13 years. 17 hits. As an added bonus, 5 of those searches are for people whose only semblance to me is their equal obscurity in cyberspace.

In contrast, a lot of Googles for my name stem from the common habit of posting discussion transcripts. I do blog a little, and my profile is web-searchable. But it's mostly talk and doing with other people.

[Ann Otoole]

Results 1 - 10 of about 23,600 for "Ann Otoole"
Results 1 - 10 of about 25,300 for

Took me years to get my early internet years of posts cleaned off the net. You see... Potential employers google applicants. So a wise person never posts anything "unprofessional" on the internet anywhere anytime.

And yes I would never list my SL info or activities on a resume or ever mention them outside of an SL friendly environment. An association with SL is pretty much a death knell on a resume these days. Yes I tested it out of curiosity. You are auto branded as undesirable in many sectors if you have any connection to SL.

[HALEY Salomon]

1700. For second life me ,, mostly me,,, 2210 ,, for real life me ,, totally me, la de da , I still have,, A real-life!

[Hotspur O'Toole]

13 pages of hits for Hotspur O'Toole, 24 for my real name-- not all of which are mine, though most are. It's a reasonably unique combination.

[Oxytone]

For me, 9,720 for my real name and just one lonely hit for my avatar name (Gahum Riptide), but that's because it shows up on a SL related blog.

I gest 15,600 for Gahum though. Of course, I took it from Visayan languages (Tagalogs have it too). It means power, might, potency, govern and rule, though I picked it because it's so macho sounding and I'm hardly macho. Sort of a geeky linguistic nerd joke :D.

[Doubledown Tandino]

SL name
Doubledown Tandino -8,690

RL name
Brad Reason -672,000

Britney Spears Naked -1,920,000

[Rodion Resistance]

SL (Rodion Resistance) = 1050

RL (Rodion Herrera) = 134

[Ken Zhao]

SL (Ken March) = 14500
RL (Ken Zhao) = 8270

Roughly 2:1 ratio

[Stone Semyorka]

Drat! Foiled again by the bad luck of having the same RL name as a movie star.

"Stone Semyorka" gets 1850 returns from Google. While my RL nickname and last name, which are the same as a movie star's, gets 1,490,000 returns.

More bad luck, my given first name and last name are the same as some guy who teaches people how to win big at Vegas. So, 90,400 returns for that name.

Finally, to get just me by using my middle initial, the returns drop to 5,100. All of these names are making life too complicated.

Anyway, 5,100 to 1,850 is a ratio of 2.8 to 1.

Whew!

[SignpostMarv Martin]

filtering out results not related to me, I get an SL:RL ratio of 4890:1

[T_S_Kimball]

This was actually an interesting exercise for me, since I've had posts on USENET that go back to 1992 (on rec.arts.drwho and rec.games.pinball mostly). NONE of them showed up in the first six pages over the five different variants of my name.

[NOTE - Yahoo was used for this search comparison since I will not use G.]

SL (Alan Kiesler) - 204, almost all of it me. First hit is my weblog (which is odd since I've not posted to that as him in a VERY long time!). Nearly half of it are references to my comments on the SL forum update from Robin, and/or the SL Brand Center changes. The rest are from posts on the Myst Online forums (stating my SL identity) around the time of Shutdown II.

RL - over 900 that are directly mine. Most of them are stated as 'T_S_Kimball' which is the name I use on almost every forum since late 2003 (including about 6 Myst/Uru related ones which I was active). It's also the name I use on weblog comments. I needed to use my full name (with middle initial) in order to get any coherent group of posts that are nearly all mine (50). T_S_Kimball is also my There.com identity so posts related to that come up as well (but, again, I am myself in There so I put that list here).

I would like to add that I almost *never* post as Alan anymore, since I prefer to identify as my RL name nowadays (and I still consider myself 'retired' from SL). If there was a way to actually have my name changed in SL to my RL one (without allowing the 'Kimball' last name to be public) I'd do it.

@Ann - I don't consider my association with SL to be a burden in IT circles; On the contrary I can show it to be an asset. Many times my public posts are discussions of specific issues and high-level suggestions of how it can be fixed (from a SysAdmin's perspective), which is what I do in my RL job anyway. I also used to do comparisons between SL and There - which are now quite old but still have held up well.

--TSK

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

My case is a bit complex :) since I'm afraid that, as a Portuguese, my full RL name has 5 names, which I rarely use (I rarely use my RL name anyway...).

So, searching for "Gwyneth Llewelyn" gives me 19,900 hits on Google. An interesting side effect is that most people misspell my name or simply abbreviate to "Gwyn". On Google, I'm (currently) the 9th "Gwyneth", the other links being almost all related to my famous and lovely namesake, the actress Gwyneth Paltrow. I'm also the 9th "Gwyn", having to compete with another even more famous actress, Nell Gwyn. The illustrious Llewelyn families, from King Llewelyn of Gwynedd, to the British actor Desmond Llewelyn (who played "Q" in the old James Bond movies), delegate my own avatar's last name to the 17th place.

My RL name is rather plain, simple, and common. The whole 5 names just get one hit in Google when used together; my own younger brother, who shares with me the last three names, outranks me by quite a lot (he publishes a lot of research material). Using my more usual abbreviation of first two names and last name, I get around 500 hits, many of which are from the tens of thousands of people who share the same combination of names and have posted at least something on the Web; I haven't followed them all, but I'd say that roughly half of the links come from me. Then again, using just the first and last RL name gives around 650,000 links, almost none of them related to me at all — the first reference is at #63; the next (at #69) comes from my own brother's blog!

So it would be close to 100:1 in my case if I use my three RL names, far more than that if I use only two!

[Daikon Hammerer]

Avatar name: 11 results displayed by google.

Real name: 1,490,000 results, but I share my name with an extremely well-known conspiracy theorist, and I'm not even in the first 60 pages of results.

So, the comparison doesn't really work for me.

[Doubledown Tandino]

hmmmm... , Daikon Hammerer ....
RL name 1,490,000 results
"britney spears naked" - also 1,490,000 results.
Methinks me has a conspiracy theory of my own.
:O)

[Aplonis Ember]

3,670 for "Gan Uesli Starling"
1,460 for "Aplonis Ember"

For a ratio of 2.514 in favor of RL versus SL. Yet, considering that I manage 7 Internet domains, have posted under my real name on umpteen forums for as many years...and that I've only been in SL since January...why bother with RL at all?

[Neptune Rebel]

I get 155 for my RL name and 115 for my SL name. The majority of results in my SL name are me (suprisingly) and same for my RL. Interesting!

[Hamlet Au]

Double checking, I noticed someone up there didn't put their RL name "in quotes" when they Googled, but I'm not saying who. :)

[Garrett larkham]

I was inspired by Kit's post and on Friday I discovered roughly 650 SL hits, vs. about 1600 for RL (I was #3). I was so impressed by the other men sharing my name that I eagerly listed their occupations on my blog that afternoon. When I logged on that evening, a friend asked if my RL name was *******. I was dumbfounded as she told me she used software called Zoom Info to cross reference the occupations. Needless the say, the post was quickly pulled. /me is embarrassed.

[Patch Lamington]

It might be scary when your avatar is more famous than your real self...

...but what do you do when your alt scores higher than your avatar?

Patch 'more famous in RL, but not a terrbily unusual RL name' Lamington

[Adia Clary]

my av hits was 1,020 and my real name, a whopping 30. I guess I try to be more protective of my rl identity since that one could influence things in rl. I most likely have more hits on my av, but not with my last name.

Adia Clary

[ArminasX]

Hmm, I estimate that my real name has approximately 52 hits, if I filter out the imposters who aren't me. Meanwhile, Google seems to think my avatar has 5,970 for a astounding ratio of 1 to 114.807692307692307692307692307693. (Take that, Dedric!)

[Stephanie Misfit]

2 hits for my RL name (that's 2 hits too many for me!), and 1430 for my SL name.