What does it mean to "Google" someone, and how do you do it?

There are some tricks to narrowing down a particular individual. First of all, they have to be somewhat visible in order for Google to return any hits. That is, they have to have their name in a publication, or do a lot of posting on message boards. If there's no information for Google to index, it's not going to return any results.

Enclose the full name in quotation marks and include the city. "Bryan Ray" Wichita, KS will get you some info on me. Notably, my Amazon profile, a web page I constructed for a roleplaying game, and some posts on a forum.

You'll probably also get a lot of spurious results. There are evidently quite a few football players named Bryan Ray, for instance.

If you know any of your target's aliases, don't forget to put those in to see what comes up. A lot of 'net handles are so common that it may take some additional filtering to narrow things down. Again, using myself as an example, I find that I have to add -FFXI -"Final Fantasy" -WoW to a query for Midgardsormr in order to filter out some obnoxious video game results that are diluting my identity. (The - operator tells Google to omit results that contain certain words or phrases.)

Anyway, having done that, I see that my AB profile now comes up as the fourth Google entry. Don't neglect the "advanced search" feature on Google, which can add some additional tools for narrowing your search to a particular individual.

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What does it mean to "Google" someone, and how do you do it?

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