I search the Internet for my name, from time to time, and usually nothing much interesting about me comes up, save for all the stories that I have written that are cluttering up the Internet.

But as I browse through the results looking for James Keller the journalist in Vancouver, I sometimes forget that all those other pages are other James Kellers who probably sort through my name when they look for themselves, because in this Internet age everyone searches for everybody.

There’s James Keller the computer scientist and Internet expert; Helen Keller’s father James; Father James Keller, the priest from the protestant Christophers movement who for years hosted the TV program Christopher Closeup.

At the University of Missouri-Columbia, James Keller teaches mathematics and is now the vice-president of publications for the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He’s usually at the top of the search results, but it changes.

In Florida, there’s James Keller who lists Tom Kenny, the voice behind the hugely popular Spongebob Squarepants, among the people he’d like to meet. He says he thinks of himself as a cartoon, and has been a voiceover artist for the past 10 years, specializing in character voices, narrations and cartoons, among other things. His vocal range, he says on his resume, is almost limitless: “I can accomplish any dialect, imitating almost any voice style I hear.” James also likes Harley Davidson motorcycles and video games. He is a Sagittarius.

Private James Keller of Crookston, Ontario, was by any measure just a boy when he was shipped overseas during the First World War. He was a 21-year-old labourer standing just five-feet-six-inches tall when he signed up for the Canadian Infantry, leaving behind his parents Fred and Phoebe to head overseas with the 21st Battalion of the Eastern Ontario Regiment. He signed his attestation papers in Kingston, Ontario, in November 1914. He was dead less than two years later, killed on September 15, 1916, and buried at Vimy in Pas de Calais, France.

James Keller of Alexandria, Virginia, died in February of this year at the age of 42. His friends called him Jimmy, and he drove a Hummer. He will be missed.

James Gordon Keller lured dying cancer patients to his clinic in Matamoros, Mexico, where he sold them false hope but little else in the early 1980s. He was not a doctor, but he promised a $3,000 miracle cure using a mix of crystals, herbal teas, vitamins, massages and injections. Some of his patients reportedly died, and in 1991, he was sentenced to two years in prison, fined $18,000 and put on probation for five years. His conviction was upheld on appeal.

There’s James Keller the clinical pathologist, whose work focuses on, among other things, botulism and tetanus; James Keller, the former Kentucky Supreme Court judge now practising law in Lexington; and James Keller the patrol officer with the police department in Bonney Lake, a quiet community carved out of the Cascade Mountain Range about a half-hour east of Tacoma, Washington.

It’s a common enough name, and I don’t really think a name means much of anything, but I suppose it’s as good a reason as any to link two complete strangers. Or at least something to notice when I type in my name on Google and think, There’s just nothing interesting here.