Do you know what a doppelganger is? The term shows up a lot in horror and science fiction TV shows. On Stargate SG-1 Samantha Carter’s doppelganger is the evil Replicator Samantha. On Star Trek: The Next Generation Data had an evil twin brother named Lore. You get the idea.
A googleganger is someone with your name. You’ll discover your googleganger by entering your name into Google (this is known as “googling yourself”) and seeing the other people share your name.
One college student owes a surprise visit from her mother to her googleganger. “I know about the porn,” her mother announced. It turned out that Mom had googled her daughter and a bunch of porn sites came up. Imagine the mother’s relief when she discovered her daughter wasn’t involved in porn, it was just someone else with the same name.
Google yourself. You never know what you may find.
I have a googleganger that shares not only a name but at least 41 other items about our life that are amazing. We met through Google and have aappeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. At the time in 2005, we didn’t even know what a googleganger was, we just found each other and discovered the similarities.
Having a name like Karen Burns means you have dozens of Googlegangers. At first I didn’t like it (how dare they have my name?) but now I’m beginning to think there’s safety in numbers.
I have a friend named Anne Lindsay who’s made a little project of contacting the other Anne Lindsays. She thinks it’s fun! Possibly this is going too far but it does show a healthy attitude.