Googling yourself

You'd've thought I'd've worked out how to take a decent photograph of a computer screen by now.

Anyway, there's this phenomenon called egosurfing where you type your name into Google to see what comes up, and apparently it's incredibly useful for self-employed people like me who play irresponsibly fast and loose with their online identities, because it shows you what you need to delete from the internet if you want your professional image to stay in some sort of vaguely pristine shape.

But is there possibly perhaps a subtle difference between googling yourself and googling your own company name? Who cares? This blip is what I discovered this morning as I uploaded a new blogpost (on the scintillating subject of how to superimpose deciles over a histogram in Microsoft Excel).

Search engine search results. They are sometimes billed as being the be-all-and-end-all for small entrepreneurial consultancies like mine. But when push comes to shove, does any of this ephemeral nonsense really matter, apart, that is, from deciding how well you manage to feed your family..?