Who is your Googlegänger?

I can't remember when the first time I googled my own name was, but I do remember the results. There weren't many, and I was among them, but there were two other entries. One was a race time for a 5K that a 35-year-old had run in Chicago, and another was some sort of reference to a math teacher in Utah.

I found it absolutely fascinating that the only other two mentions of my name on the internet that didn't reference me corresponded to a runner and to a math teacher, both of which were a major part of my own identity.

More entries come up now when I google my own name, and many of them refer to me, but I also sort of subconsciously keep tabs on the other two. I think the Utah math teacher is married now.

Occasionally I'll google friends' and family's names, too, just out of curiosity, but when I do that I'm really only looking for references to them. When I google my own name I am interested in myself, but also in the others out there.

And apparently I'm not alone. There was an interesting article in the New York Times, that talked about how we tend to be drawn to people similar to ourselves. Even down to the fact that people named Virginia are statistically more likely to move to Virginia, or people with last names with B voted more frequently for Bush in the last elections, and people with last names starting with G voted more frequently for Gore. We already know that we're drawn to people with whom we have things in common, but it's fascinating to me that we're also drawn to people with whom we share very superficial characteristics, like a name or even an initial.