I’m darn lucky. You would think my name “David Spark” would be rather common, but in actuality it’s not. The last name “Sparks” is actually more common than “Spark” making “David Spark” a rather uncommon name. Search my name in Google and I’m currently nine out of the first ten results. But a lot of that has to do with my presence online for more than 12 years. I’ve only found two other “David Spark”s out there. But my only knowledge of “out there” has to do with what I’ve found on Google. Most of us equate “making it in Google” to that of “making it in the phone book.”
Interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today about parents that first consult the Google uniqueness of their unborn child’s name. If not unique, or it shares the name of a serial killer, it’s scrapped for one that passes the Googlewhack test of being found on only one or maybe no pages on the Internet.
While you’re Googling your unborn child’s name, why not check to see if the domain is available and then buy your child’s domain name.
Thanks as always to Good Morning Silicon Valley for giving me the heads up on this. But then again, I found out they look at Techmeme, which is where I found this story as well. More at Valleywag, Buzzworthy, Publishing 2.0.
UPDATE: Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington just happen to moderate a panel discussion on people search last night at Google headquarters. The search giant opened their doors to “name niche” competitors Spock, Wink, and Zoominfo. I’ve seen Spock before and it’s pretty darn cool. I think there will be a nice merger between the blog world and name searching.
As for people who have generic names like John Smith (which supposedly yields somewhere between 158 and 225 million Google search results), maybe you might want to add a nickname in quotes between your first and last name.
