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
She sells seashells by the seashore. Who is the she in this tongue twister? Some claim it’s the young Mary Anning, who went on to become a famous 19th-century British paleontologist. Dubious perhaps, but the story of her rise from seaside...
Ben calls from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to say that he and his wife, who is from Germany, were taking a leisurely stroll at Valley Forge. They ended up leaving one of the trails and taking a diagonal route across a field and agreed that in...
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