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Google – I’ve got a bone to pick with you!

March 18th, 2009 Posted in editorial, soapbox

I was doing some vanity surfing tonight on Google. You know, Googling my name to see where I come up. Between newmediamike.com, mikeallan.com and being on Facebook, Linked In etc etc, my name comes up quite a few times in the top 10 for “Mike Allan”.

BUT

There was another Mike with a similar last name in the Top 10 who doesn’t belong there.

allan-allen-wtf

What the fudge? Mike Allen ? With an E? C’mon Google! You can’t be serious!

All my life my family name has been mis-spelled. My family name is A L L A N. Not A L L E N.  How can Google screw up spelling someone’s name?  Throughout the Top 100 searches for my name there are a lot of references to the jazz player Mike Allen and the Politico columnist Mike Allen, oh and a ton of my pages too, but still, how can they screw up spelling a name?

I’m forwarding this post to Google’s Matt Cutts to see what he has to say. Stay tuned.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 11:33 pm and is filed under editorial, soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • Just loved this blog, keep posts like this one coming, you are totally awesome, subscribed you right away!
  • Whoops, apparently Connie already scooped me on the fuzzy-matching... (it's confusing that the comment box is ABOVE the comments already left...)
  • I dunno Mike, seems like standard Google fuzzy-matching to me... Of course, I can't seem to find any other examples right at the moment - but I see it all the time. Google will often return results for various spellings of a term within a single SERP.
  • So, I take it that is not you? ;-)

    I think Google has almost always done some fuzzy searching to pick up typos and common misspellings people make in their searches. It's probably just the first time it has showed up so high in your search results. Or maybe they have varied what they show a little bit (usually it comes up as "Did you mean..." at the top) Hopefully if someone accidentally spells your name as Mike Allen with an e in a search, they will see some of your Mike Allan with an a in the results, too. You might want to try googling that spelling, too, just to see.

    Cheers,
    Connie
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