Larry, on the internet

Earlier in the week we spoke of anonymity on the internet, and also what happens when you search your own name on a search engine. When you want to find information about something or somebody, the first thing people would do nowadays would be to "google" it or "wiki" it. That is, search for the information online through Google's search engine, or to search the information on WikiPedia's online database. While this may be a good way to find websites containing information on relatively well-known people or information, we see that there is information which repeats the exact same information. For example, I was looking for details regarding a specific t-shirt released in 2007, I read the exact same articles on Freshness, Format, and Hypebeast, none of which contained the information I was looking for. But when I searched my own name on Google, no results pertaining to myself appeared (although I only looked through the first 10-15 search results pages). So why is it that there is so much duplicity of relatively well known information, but no information on someone or something that is less recognized world wide?


You may think that because there are no search results for somebody's name that perhaps they just do not use internet services as much as, say, somebody who writes a blog. However, I have alot of online activity, and I have several accounts on many websites and I also contribute to blogs, but still there are no search results on me. The reason why is because I almost all of my online activity is done anonymously. None of my accounts online are associated with "Larry Yang" (except those that involve credit cards i.e. PayPal). I often buy/sell/trade various things online between people I have never met before, and most of the time I will never even find out their name, and vice versa. So I actually have alot of websites and activity on several chat boards, but nobody would ever know by googling my name. So while I am doing things anonymously, I am doing no harm to people and the reason I choose anonymity is for security, but there are many people who abuse anonymity on the internet. For example, on many message boards, there are users who spam offensive material, and thus their accounts are closed. However, there is no way to prevent those same people to create a new account, and this scenario is very common.