Egon
Epic Contributor
Other sites that I have posted on have my information available on google under my name. 
Should I change my posting idenity?
Should I change my posting idenity?
TBN Member Personal info obtained by Google!!??
- Thread starter Unclebuck257
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MossRoad
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MikePA said:
Sure it does. Search engines use spiders to crawl the web and see what's out there. Spiders and crawlers mean pretty much the same thing these days to most people.
MossRoad
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Egon said:Other sites that I have posted on have my information available on google under my name.
Should I change my posting idenity?
Yes. We all should. I think a good way to do it is to add three O's to the end of our user names.
I would be MossRoadooo. You would be Egonooo. Etc...
GreenMtns
Gold Member
MossRoad said:
Thats a good idea, but of course we don't have the ability to change our usernames.
MikePA
Super Moderator
UncleBuck257 did a search for information that's only on the sites where he's a member. It makes sense that TBN would float to the top of that list. IOW, there's nothing wrong or amiss. There's no problem or anything sinister going on.MossRoad said:
How many people out there know our username on TBN? By and large, only other TBNers.
tallyho8
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Some of us may be too paranoid nowdays. I looked in the telephone directory and it listed my name, full address and also my phone number and thousands of other peoples also.
OP
Unclebuck257
Platinum Member
I guess what really surprised me was that I googled only under my full and formal real name, and not what I generally go by. In other words, my given name is James, but I go by Jim. I'm signed in here as "Jim". Additionally, in my googling, I NEVER typed in my handle name anywhere, ONLY my given full name, and never typed in anything about this site, or any other site I belong to now, or belonged to in the past. As I said, no other site was mentioned and no other site came up, only TBN, and in a paragraph by itself under Unclebuck257.
BTW, those other two sites that I believe Moss mentioned are old sites and I have not belonged to them in literally, years. I was just very surprised, that's all.
BTW, those other two sites that I believe Moss mentioned are old sites and I have not belonged to them in literally, years. I was just very surprised, that's all.
jdbower
Platinum Member
Unclebuck257 said:
That is part of the magic of Google - it's commonly called fuzzy logic. Google will try to spell check your searches, apparently change a search for "James" into "James or Jim", and do neat things like show you tracking information if you search for a UPS tracking number. You can also ask it questions, like "number of feet in a mile" and it will give you its own answer in addition to doing a search for you. Pretty cool stuff!
MossRoad
Super Moderator
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- South Bend, Indiana (near)
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- Power Trac PT425 2001 Model Year
Unclebuck257 said:
I guess that since I work with this stuff every day, it no longer surprises me how much stuff there is out there about each of us. If it is posted on a web page, you can pretty much guarantee that it will be found by a search engine sooner or later.
MikePA
Super Moderator
Ditto.MossRoad said:
About a month ago, we needed to buy some hay to tide us over until next spring. Our usual supplier was out. Bummer. Well, we'll just cut back a little.
While out driving around, we saw a barn near the road with a 'Hay for Sale' sign hanging on it. Stopped. Knocked on the door. No answer. The person's name was not on the mailbox, just the number. Since it was out in the boonies, I couldn't even determine what the name of the street was. I used Street Atlas to determine the street name and by using free sites on the Internet, I could determine who lived there and what their phone number was.