Have you ever googled yourself? Anyone who says they don’t is either unfamiliar with the term or is just lying, lying, lying. Googling someone means doing a web search on them; googling yourself means you’re seeing what other people see when they google you. My last name is one of the most common English surnames in the world and my first name was rather trendy in the late ‘70s and ‘80s; kind of like how the “Grey’s Anatomy” character names are now. (I pity the Derek and Preston Browns of the future). Thus, today, there are Aaron Browns hiding in all corners of the Internet, on college football teams, correcting code on tech sites, committing felonies in other states and, more often than I care to consider, dying tragically before their time or after a long, courageous battle with a terrible illness.


Then, of course, former CNN anchor Aaron Brown still has a choke hold on my name in most search engines. In 2001, I wrote a column about how disappointed I was to be a journalist who shared a name with a much more famous journalist. Not only was big-time Aaron Brown more famous than me, but he was from Minnesota and nearsighted too. One day, he called me to tell me he read the column. His mom had hired a clipping service, which found my column online, and then she had sent it to him in New York.


So thanks to the Internet, even if I’m not the only Aaron Brown in the world, I am right there in the hunt.


Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.