Sabina Anand

My Search Engine Identity

I used Google for all of the below queries and searched in both regular and incognito browsing mode. I was pleasantly surprised to find that were no visible differences when searching in the different modes.

Search Query: "Sabina Anand"

Googling myself is always particularly interesting because I actually have a knowledge panel that lists me as an author. This is always the first thing that catches my eye onscreen. I self-published a book when I was 12 years old (I know, I don't know what I was doing at 12 years old either), which is the book listed underneath my published work. Although I've seen this knowledge panel before, this was the first time I was curious enough to see what happened when I pressed "Claim knowledge panel". I was asked to provide my reasoning for claiming, a selfie, and a photo of my government-issued ID.

As for the search results themselves, most of them were related to my professional/academic life. My LinkedIn profile shows up first, followed by a link to my author profile on Amazon. The images that show up are also mostly actually photos of me, two from when I was 12, and two more recent images. The cover photo for my novel also appears.

One link that always makes me laugh, appearing 3rd in the search results, is a link to my IMDb profile, which I only have from being in an extra in a TV show when I was 11 years old. (Yes, I know, middle school me was infinitely more interesting than college me).

I was pleasantly surprised to find that none of my social media links show up upon googling my name. After the first 5 results, the links are all to social media profiles of other strangers that share my name. So, my consensus is that while I wish my search results returned more recent images/articles about me, I'm glad that they are all professional and academic in tone.

Search Query: "Sabina Anand Instagram"

The fact that my social media links didn't appear when googling my name made me curious to discover how easy it might be for a stranger online to find my social media. This query still failed to display my real Instagram account (despite my username containing my full name), and I'm not quite sure why this is the case but my guess would be that my actual display name is just my first name. Interestingly enough, the fourth search result was a link to my Pinterest account, that I haven't used in years. I can't seem to wrap my head around why this account shows up and my Instagram account doesn't even though the usernames are the exact same. I suppose it might be time to reevaluate my privacy settings on Pinterest.