As a roundabout way to admit that I don’t ‘Google’ myself too often, it was brought to my attention today that something odd happens when one does a search for ‘Q-Burns’. The info panel that comes up on the right side of the Google search page looks like this:
OK, that’s not my photo. That’s a picture of my friend Brett Johnson, who I have worked with many times but that’s no reason for him to inadvertently take over my identity.
I put a call out to Twitter for theories on this mishap. Pete Dafeet helpfully pointed out that the photo is sourced from a YouTube still on my Reverb Nation page. No offense, Reverb Nation, but I haven’t touched my page there in over five years, and it seems odd that this is where Google’s robots would choose to grab my ‘artist photo.’
On Pete’s advice, I deleted the video from Reverb Nation (which you can watch here if you’d like … it’s for my remix of Brett Johnson’s “Missing You”) which in turn deleted the offending photo from my Reverb Nation page. It will be interesting to see how long it will take Google to change my default image in its search results and, even more interesting, what its robots might replace it with.
So, if you’re like me and don’t ‘Google’ yourself that often, and are a musician or are in a band, you might want to do so to see what image is attached to your results.
Update: It looks like deleting that video from Reverb Nation did the trick.
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