According to the Times's article on Googlegängers,

In studies involving Internet telephone directories, Social Security death index records and clinical experiments, Brett Pelham, a social psychologist, and colleagues have found in the past six years that Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word “lane,” not “street.”

How about that? No wonder I always find myself wandering drunk along Jay St. at 3am, with no idea how I got there. I assume they shy away from occupational examples given that surnames used to come from occupations, but I was still amused at this sentence in a story today about pilots:

Thus, Mr. [Jason] Captain, who looks forward to being called Captain Captain, turned down a job at American Eagle Airlines, the regional division of American Airlines.

The main thrust of the article is about the habit of using Google to keep track of people with your name who have a web presence, and competing with them for search engine rankings. I've been doing quite poorly at the latter; the first results for my name that actually refer to me are on page 6. A developer of educational software and an art director take up many of the results ahead of me. Then again, I've done little on the web that emphasizes my own name, rather than a username or a band name, and I continue to belong to zero social networking sites.