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Bloody hell!!!!!
had never entered my head to take account of any of this
at least never worried bout it 14 years ago with dd1!

I don't get why you wouldn't google a name before you gave it to a child...

DD1 has a fairly unusual (we thought) first name, but it is quite catholic, and our surname is quite irish...so there are quite a few of her in America and Ireland. Most famous seems to be a female bodybuilder.

DD2 brings up some americans on a site simaler to this deciding against that name . Also a drummer.

I'm apparently a film director, and DH is a very common name. He is quite proud that his name apparently means "Victory of the people" and our surname means "the dark one" though.

Unbelievable!
Not only does someone else have my name, but my kids too!!

DD has an ancient hebrew name that is so rare we have to spell it to everyone we meet, and yet there are several others who have also paired it with our scottish surname!

My name is very much my identity as it is very unusual (both first and surname, although my maiden name was much more common). I am the only me on a Google search and stuff of mine comes up because I have worked in the public sector and attended lots of committee meetings that are routinely released, and I also have some published research (minor stuff). I am very careful about what I say and do in any case, not because of the internet or Google, but because professionally any email I write could be subject to a Freedom of Information request, so it's a habit now. I am on FB but I've locked down all my privacy settings, and again wouldn't publish anything risque or offensive. I've never had anyone contact me as a result of a google search (or FB for that matter)

dh's twitter account comes up first on googling him, which surprised me, but reflects how unusual our surname is (his first name in much more common). There are 8 on FB. ds came up as being born in 1871, and also as some obscure C19 French poet. He has no FB matches, whilst dd has one, and nothing on Google.

We are easy to find because of unusual surname but I hate this. It creeps me out to think that all and sundry can find out about us so easily.

However, the surname doesn't sound unusual, it sounds quite commonplace, so hopefully any malevolent nutters wouldn't know it was definitely us.

Is handy to get easily rememberable email addresses though.

Interesting question. My maiden surname is pretty rare (probably only around 100 living peoplewith this surname) and I am the only one I know of with my first name (and I have been researching my family tree).

My married surname is quite common though, so if I google my married name I come up with quite a few, and consequently ds's name is also not too rare.

I have to say, i really like the idea of having an unusual name, and maybe should have kept my maiden name!

I can see lots of benefits of having an ungoogleble name. Your name is not your identity, it's just a small part of who you are. I'd still be me if I were Poinsettia Fortescue-Smythe, I just have a bit more anonymity like this. Which I like, tbh, esp as I'm in a profession where people can and do stalk people pretty often. I've googled and ancestry.com'd the DCs names and there are millions of hits (not them) - I think I'd rather let them be memorable by their actions than their name.

There are some famous people with DS?s name - one v famous now dead, and a couple of sort-of famous sportspersons/political activists. So very doubtful that he will ever be googleable, as the dead very famous person comes up on the first 3 pages!
V interesting question - have just finished some training on children in care and the problems with birth families identifying their whereabouts. The consensus was that face book and google are potentially very threatening to the security of children?s placements, but there is really not a lot that can be done about it. Quite depressing actually

DD has a unique name and DS has only one match, but our surname is pretty unique, particularly in the UK where there is (to my knowledge) only 4 of us in the phone book, and 3 of them are close relations!

Both my DC have conventional english (although not terribly common) names. Even if they'd had poplular names at the time of their birth (Molly, Alice, Siobhan, Grace for DD and George, Jack & Thomas for DS) I think that their names would still be pretty unique, just because of the surname.

If our family name had been Smith or Jones, I wonder if I'd have named them differently???

Interesting question OP!

IsThatTheTime - you're right about not being able to predict who else will have the same name in future - if I google DD's name, I get pages of results for a somewhat notorious girlfriend (or possibly now ex-girlfriend) of a rapper, who was obviously not in evidence when I named DD 20 years ago. Annoyingly, it's not even this woman's real name, though ironically her real first name was actually DH's first choice for DD...

DS's name which is not very common in the UK (and sometimes described as 'posh' by some mumsnetters) is surprsingly common in the US, New Zealand and France.

Have just googled my DD's name...just her first and middle names, no surname, and she's one of the top ten links! I'm well chuffed.

Just googled DS's name and the first hit is his grandma's Bebo page talking about him. Lots of false positives, though, because there appear to be a pair of famous rally drivers who share his (unusual) name between them - one has his first and middle names and the other has his surname. And they're local to us. How odd!

All my DS's have names in the top 50. However our surname is quite uncommon, it's one of those ones you need to spell all the time.

Just searched FB. There are 8 DS1s, 10 DS2s and zero DS3s. There is also two of me, one of which is me.

Googlinf their names, DS3 is apparently a famour high court judge in Texas, who knew!

To answer the OP, I cannot see ANY benefits of having a 'John Smith' (thousands of them) name. I agree with previous posters that the whole point of naming someone is to IDENTIFY them.

we have unusual last name and both ds have unsual fn, actually didnt think of this google issue but is a bit uncomfy if people can find them so easily on google. although i dont think anything will come up so far as they are young, but later in life it could be an issue. in terms of googling and that kind of thing it is probably better to have a not so rare name, but i just liked the unusual names for them..

googling my kids just brings up their appearances in local rag

Our surname is so unusual that it didn't really matter what first names we gave the DC they're always going to be easily traced (well DD maybe not so much if she marries & changes her name )

Interesting points - however, my primary concern when googling my children's names before announcing them to the world was that I hadn't inadvertently named them after serial killers or porn stars. And thankfully, I hadn't. That's not to say there won't be any in the future though obviously!

I am totally unique, bloody hippy parents

I am the only me, DD1 is the only her (bar a couple of long-dead versions) and DD2 is the only one of her too (dead or alive) on FB or Google.

How 'Google-able' or otherwise a name might be didn't affect our choice of names but as our surname is very unusual in the UK we are careful to ensure that our DDs' names don't appear online in conjunction with our surname. If we are asked for permission for photographs to be put in newspapers/online we always state that our consent is valid provided our surname is not used.

When they are older both DDs are going to have to be sensible about their online profiles as they will, potentially, be very easy to identify. With the children I teach I make it very clear that usernames need to be non-gender specific e.g. cavegirl isn't a good one and that cavecreature is preferable. My 'maiden' name is also a male name which meant that it was often assumed that I was a male...my daughters won't have that 'luxury' (it was a horrible name and no-one ever spelt/pronounced it correctly, hence changing it when I got married).

I'm pretty much unique - I thought I was unique but was quite upset for five minutes the other day to discover another of me in America. I had to really look tho', they haven't turned up on google yet.

I'm not on Facebook for various reasons. I always think if people want to find me all they have to do is google me and there I am. I really struggle to find people I was at school with, it was the english border near wales - loads of roberts, phillips, hughes, edwards etc.

DP isn't unique, tho there aren't many. Just tried dd, and there are no others (so far!).

I did like the idea of her having an unusual name - I always liked the unusualness of mine as a child, not so much the name itself. I hope dd will feel the same.

You might also like to think about how their name will appear in an email address.

I got an email recently from someone called Lee Rather - without spaces in the email address I read it as 'Leer at her'

And when I create user names for our learning platform, which usually have the form first initial +surname, I have several times had to insert an extra initial to prevent an unfortunate combination...

My sister has a googlewhack (only one of her) name and mine is also pretty unusual. Not mad names just the first name and surname combo. We both hate it as we don't want to be found!