Googleganger
n.— Note: From the German word “doppelgänger,” meaning a look-alike or a double of a person. «It was an honest mistake: Eve’s name kept showing up on X-rated sites when her mother Googled it to keep tabs on her daughter. But that Eve Fairbanks wasn’t her Eve—it was a “Googleganger,” a virtual doppelganger linked by a shared name thanks to the all-knowing search engine.» —“What’s in a name? Only Google knows” Daily Herald (Chicago, Illinois) Oct. 4, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...
The more one searches for a subject, animate or otherwise, the more that subject “shows up” in web statistics and the greater the liklihood that promoters of sites will add that subject to the keyword lists that they use to try and improve the search engine ranking of their site.
Some people have a fascination with their Googlegangers. Perhaps seeing them as akin to alter egos in another reality, or multiple egos in this reality. Given this, perhaps the death of a Googleganger is worthy of reflection. Did you just lose some part of yourself?
What is that person? How about a GOOGLEGEIST. This term currently has minor other meanings. But I posit that it be imbued with this meaning.
Wes Boudville