Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Despite being online for a very long time by today’s standards (~1980), I have been difficult to find in search engines until fairly recently.

This basically has 4 reasons:

1. The components of my name, “Ho”, “John”, and “Lee” are all short and common in several different contexts, so there are a vast number of indexed documents with those components.
2. Papers I’ve published are listed under “Lee, H.J.” or something similar, lumping them together with the thousands of other Korean “Lee, H.J.”s. Something like 14% of all Koreans have the “Lee” surname, and “Ho” and “Lee” are both common surnames in Chinese as well. Various misspellings, manglings and transcriptions mean that old papers don’t turn up in searches even when they do eventually make it online.
3. Much of the work that I’ve done resides behind various corporate firewalls, and is unlikely to be indexed, ever. A fair amount of it is on actual paper, and not digitized at all.
4. I’ve generally been conscious that everything going into the public space gets recorded or logged somewhere, so even back in the Usenet days I have tended to stay on private networks and e-mail lists rather than posting everything to “world”.

Searching for “Ho John Lee” (no quotes) at the beginning of 2005 would have gotten you a page full of John Lee Hooker and Wen Ho Lee articles. Click here for an approximation. With quotes, you would have seen a few citations here and there from print media working its way online, along with miscellaneous RFCs.

Among various informal objectives for starting a public web site, one was to make myself findable again, especially for people I know but haven’t stayed in contact with. After roughly six months, I’m now the top search result for my name, on all search engines.

As Steve Martin says in The Jerk (upon seeing his name in the phone book for the first time), “That really makes me somebody! Things are going to start happening to me now…”

Wired this month on people who are Ungoogleable:

As the internet makes greater inroads into everyday life, more people are finding they’re leaving an accidental trail of digital bread crumbs on the web — where Google’s merciless crawlers vacuum them up and regurgitate them for anyone who cares to type in a name. Our growing Googleability has already changed the face of dating and hiring, and has become a real concern to spousal-abuse victims and others with life-and-death privacy needs.
…
But despite Google’s inarguable power to dredge up information, some people have succeeded — either by luck, conscious effort or both — in avoiding the search engine’s all-seeing eye.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.