(alter) ego surfing

Ego surfing; it's something we've all done before. Whether or not the results work in your favour, well, that's a different story.

A combined first and last name isn't as rare as it used to be. You'll likely meet someone during your school years with your first name. (I don't know what assumed statistic to throw at you for meeting something outside your family with your last name.) And as for finding someone with both? That's where the Internet can help fill-in the gaps; it's only a matter of time before Google spiders find your name-based doppelganger and make the results available to all.

So with a little spare time at work and a lot of curiousity, I started throwing, not only my name, but the names of several others into Google, and taking a look at what it gave me in return. Old friends, new friends, Facebook friends... everybody was fair game.

I'm still the only Emanuel Rabina on the Internet with Google giving me up to 2 pages of results on myself before going awry. Only a few others were just as unique, providing up to a page of accurate results before going on first-name/last-name tangents. As for the rest though, that's when the lols started.

Those with 2 first names gave the greatest variety of results, but a few honestly surprised me. For example, I found-out I have friends who share names with: a hand-crafted furniture maker, a canoeist, a doctor of medicine, a wrestler, a dentist, an illustrator, an actress, a singer/songwriter, a professional trainer, a scientologist, and a porn star.