Sometimes the internet is freaky…

I spend a fair amount of time on a sports forum called PennStateHoops.com dedicated naturally to Penn State basketball. There was a thread today that was off on a tangent where someone mentioned a couple of famous Fordham basketball players/coaches. In that thread it came to light that the poster didn’t know John Bach who coached at Fordham before he came to Penn State as their coach. I decided to educate the guy a little on Bach (see my post).

Since Natalie Berrena is John Bach’s granddaughter I couldn’t help but include a quick paragraph, and a little commercial, about her. I wanted to put a photo in the post so I naturally Google “Natalie Berrena” for images. Low and behold what popped up on the Google results page but this photo:

Needless to say I did a double take.

Google found one of my posts in our blog and I guess Natalie’s name was fairly close to our image so it tagged the image with her name.

Try it yourself – Google image search for “Natalie Berrena”.

8 Replies to “Sometimes the internet is freaky…”

  1. That’s weird. And did you notice result page 2 has two more? A halloween shot and a NH shot. I was curious as to whether they were from old blog or new. They’re from the new.

  2. That is wierd. Have you asked her how she feels about having our photos associated with her?

  3. No I hadn’t looked at page two. Thanks. Another funny thing is that the blog page that the images actually link to has neither Natalie’s name nor the photos on it (other that the family shot).

    I suspect that Google has an easier time finding this blog because we now have our own domain name where before we were buried under guffaw.com.

    Also if anyone has any privacy concerns, I can flag the blog so the search engines don’t scan the site (at least theoretically don’t scan the site). Let me know if you think I should.

  4. I saw her Thursday and told her about it. Actually I broke the story into two parts. I told her about how I was making the post about her grandfather and did the search and our photo popped up. Her response was “Wow. How did that happen?” When I explained the rest, she just nodded oh.

    Then I sent her an email yesterday with the links so she could actually see what I was talking about. I saw her last night and she didn’t say anything but I don’t know if she had actually seen the email or not.

    I’m going to see her later this afternoon and, if I think of it, I’ll ask her then if she got a chance to check out the links.

  5. I just googled “Fall Spring Break” (with quotes), a recent post. I got 2 of the same pix, both labled “Looking Our Best” and the 2nd’s url was …random_photos/andreas… but it was the NH shot of Char. Following the link eventually gets you to the sonogram shot, but the thumbnail was Char.

    More weird.

  6. Andreas is the name of the template design that I used for the site. If the url had random_photos in it then Google was picking the photo up from the Random Photos boxes under our family photo and not from the original post.

    Also, if you had looked closer at the url you would have seen that the file type was php, which means it is a server side script file. Everytime you click on Char’s thumbnail it would execute the server side script and return a different random photo – you just happened to get the sonogram shot when you clicked, had you hit refresh you would have gotten a different photo in my random_photos file.

  7. I just noticed this morning the “andreas” template. I guess the sonogram shot threw me, but now that I think of it, that shot is from Dawn’s pregnancy, isn’t it.

  8. I just reread my comment #4, it almost read like I was stalking Natalie. I’m not really following her around town every day.

    Thursday, JR Mangan the founder of the band she sings in had a picnic that he invited me to. I saw Natalie and her mother at the picnic which is when I told both of them the story about searching for a photo of her. Her mother is John Bach’s daughter and I had just made the post a couple of hours earlier so it was quite fresh in my mind and thus quite logical for me to tell them about the post.

    Having told them about the photo it made sense to email both of them on Friday so they could see for themselves.

    That night, the band played their normal every other weekend gig at the Cafe 210, one of the normal local establishments that I hang out at, so I saw her there as usual.

    And, finally, at the picnic Thursday Nat told me she was singing the national anthem at the Penn State baseball game on Saturday. She and her mother know that I go to all the games so we said we’d meet up at the game. As it turns out, I got a tm from Nat before the game saying that JR had just booked an afternoon show for the band and she had to cancel the anthem thing. Unfortunately, that also meant that I haven’t yet been able to ask her about how she feels with all our blog photos showing up in her search.

    PS – yes Gary the sonogram was Dawn’s.

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