Open University blogger Tony Hirst posted today about an interesting way he had of seeing what his “Google impact” was: the automatic Google Suggest service which tries to anticipate what you might be searching for. You’ll notice it especially when you are typing a phrase into the Google home page and it is based on what people most commonly search for.

Tony’s Google suggest profile is pretty long:

My own shows that people looking for me are most often looking for my blog or my Twitter profile:

Tony goes on to thinking about how you might measure your Google impact:

So what ingredients might go into a “Google Suggest” Impact Factor?

Number of correct mentions? Number of incorrect mentions? Explicit association with host university, or subject area?

And what might a Google Suggest Factor measure? Personal discoverability? Personal associations? Personal specialism areas?

In the comments to his post, someone called  R3beccaF suggests a measure based on combining your name with your profession or another qualifying phrase to gauge the size of your Google shadow:

In terms of impact that you can add to your promotion case, number of times you come up in a search for “your name” “open university” could be useful, because it removes all those references to Hollyoaks, Lemonrock and, in my case, the X Factor:
“tony hirst” “open university” – 3500
“martin weller” “open university” – 2890
“grainne conole” “open university” – 3600
“martin bean” “open university” – 14800

Both of these approaches are useful ways of looking more closely at your web shadow on Google. It will give you a sense of who else with your name is out there, how you might differentiate from them and give you a sense of scale.

Comparing yourself with someone famous in terms of shadow size isn’t that useful, so try a peer or colleague as a comparison to see how you’re doing. This will be especially interesting and useful as an exercise as you grow your online presence.