This post may be a bit self-centered, but hey, this whole site is all about me, so whatever...

One of the features of Windows Live Spaces allows me to see how people get to my site -- that is, the address of the web page where somebody clicked a link to get here. It only shows history for the past day (more would be nice), but I'll check it now and then just out of curiosity.

Besides links within my own blog, direct navigation (people typing the address or using a bookmark), or RSS, the most common ways people get here seem to be:

1. Links from other people's blogs. Okay, completely normal and expected.
2. Links from random search engine terms. It's interesting to see which of my posts generate traffic from a search engine and for what keywords. The most common hits seem to be in my entries about my travels in Japan or random technology topics. And the strangest thing is, more often then not they come from a particular Chinese search engine.
3. People directly searching my name. This blog comes up as the first result for most search engines when querying my first and last name, as it should. (My last name is unique enough that there isn't another "Jason Ginchereau" out there -- or if there is, he isn't anywhere on the net.)

What I want to know is, who is googling me? Now, I really don't mind. Certainly nothing I post here is intended to be private. And while you can find where I went to high school and college, various software projects I've worked on, as well as where I work now, you won't find anything bad about me, because really I've got nothing to hide. Anyway I'm just curious... who is looking for me? Are there old friends or family looking me up? Coworkers digging for dirt? Do I have a stalker?

In certain cases, I have my suspicions. If I give my name or send an email (which has my full name in the from field) to a new friend, acquaintance, or date, I might notice something like this in my blog visitor statistics the next day: http://www.google.com/search?q=Jason+Ginchereau. I don't check often, but I have noticed this pattern more than once. So if you're reading this, you may have already been detected! But don't worry, like I said I don't mind. I'll just have to google you back, then we can be openly even.

Anyway, if you got here by googling me, why not let me know? Send me an email, or add a comment below. Feel free to be anonymous, if you must.

Do you habitually google your friends/dates/coworkers/etc? Oh go on, admit it. Apparently everybody does it, even though nobody really talks about it. How do you feel when you know somebody googled you?