A few years ago I googled my own name as research for the Monkey Bible project. The idea was to see how my first book—Take Me For A Ride—was doing. The idea was to better understand the potential market for my second, up-coming book, The Monkey Bible.

So I surfed awhile and learned that Take Me For A Ride was still available on many websites, including Project Gutenberg. I had decided in 1995 to share my first book for free over the internet and while I don’t get money from the downloads, it’s a great way to share with a vast number of people around the world.

I surfed some more and discovered that Take Me For A Ride was included on someone’s Favorite Books website.

Cool, i thought. The website listed favorite books of Sergey. Sergey Brin.

Interesting name, I thought.

The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. Other books from the webpage’s list suggested I was in good company. I felt flattered. I wondered if maybe there was some mistake. Yet there it was, my full name and my book’s full title.

Rock on Sergey, I thought, whoever you are.

I googled him and learned that he, along with Larry Page, founded Google, Inc. I learned that his Favorite Books webpage was part of his website from Stanford University where he had studied computer science, data mining in particular, before founding Google.

Maybe the list had been created from randomly selected book titles as part of a data mining experiment at Stanford. Maybe Sergey actually read my first book—which has a Stanford computer science department connection—and liked it. Maybe Sergey will google his own name, find this blog, and become intrigued by The Monkey Bible’s section on Genetisis (one character’s interpretation of Genesis from a genetically accurate, biologically inclusive point of view). Maybe The Monkey Bible and its companion musical (The Line) will appear someday on Sergey’s list of favorite books and musicals which the rest of us can google.