Can 123People Find You? - Some Interesting Surprises
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Some things showed up that I expected, while others took me by surprise. For example, I expected the top web link to be about my, ah, exhibitionist namesake's legal run-in with Playboy Enterprises (which she won). But I didn't expect a tag cloud, which you could click to focus in on the results related to particular keywords. Other search engines and social bookmarking sites have used tag clouds to good effect, though, as Koch noted in her review, it's still a feature that seems to be most helpful to more advanced web searchers.
Given that 123People provided a tag cloud, I expected the words "technology" and "SEO" in the tag cloud (believe it or not, I'm not the only Terri Wells out there that writes about technology-related topics online!). But here's a section that shows a couple of things I didn't expect:
On the right you can see the tag cloud; next to it, on the left, you'll see a box labeled "Blogs." The fourth entry in this box is "How I SEO my WordPress Blog - A Beginners Guide Part 2." I know I didn't write anything like that, so I followed the link. I discovered the reason that link was included under "Blogs;" the author of the blog cited me with a link back to the article referenced in the post!
The other surprise was in the "Documents" section on the right, with my name under Wil Wheaton's. I hadn't written anything about Wil Wheaton, so what was going on there? As it turned out, the link went back to a monthly online magazine that Developer Shed used to publish. My byline appeared on several articles in that particular issue, which featured Wil Wheaton on the cover and an interview with the actor on the inside (by a different author). It's worth noting that this is an old item - at least three to four years old, in fact. I'm not entirely certain how 123People got this information, since it was taken off the web a couple of years ago, maybe more.
As to social networking profiles, 123People found me on LinkedIn, and of course, plenty of other profiles that weren't me. In case you were wondering, none of the images shown at the top of this 123People profile were me either.
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