As I don’t have a big online presence I didn’t expect to find myself through one of the major search engines. There are lots of other people with the same name so I refined my search with Libr* and found myself on a list of signatories of an online petition against library closures. I then did another search this time with my name and the term “West Yorkshire” and in the top 10 results was reference to a different online petition I had signed (again against library closures). In both these cases it would be impossible to know that it was me, rather than someone with an identical name, who had signed the petitions. This made me understand the point of branding better; a chance to make yourself identifiable as an individual. Although of course branding would not be effective in the signing of online petitions as it is usually just a case of filling the boxes. I can see how it could be beneficial to differentiate myself from others with the same name.
The site I used to do the searches was www.zuula.com. This is a website I have only recently been introduced to (on a course led by Terry Kendrick ‘Internet Search Techniques for School Librarians’). It allows you to compare the top results from a variety of different search engines. A great tool to use in information literacy lessons with sixth-form.
