Full text of an idea exposed on the RSS feed for "The Volokh Conspiracy" by David Post, and evidently soon after withdrawn (URL currently is 404, but may reappear later):

   http://volokh.com/2009/11/13/and-speaking-of/

And Speaking Of ideas for cool websites that I’ll never actually go and implement and so therefore I’m happy to give away: I would bet that you could pretty easily work up a "How Famous Are You?" site that lots of people would find pretty irresistible. The idea -- an offshoot of the incredibly popular (among authors) Amazon book rankings, which many authors consult regularly and regarding which any number of websites allowing tracking, comparing, etc. have sprung up -- is this: a comparative ranking of the number of Google "hits" associated with your name, ranked against others famous and not-so-famous. The query

   "David Post" Law Professor

[including the quotation marks] returns 18,700 hits on Google. (Just David Post without the quotation marks returns 4.1 million hits -- but of course lots and lots of those have absolutely nothing to do with me (there are lots of davids out there, and lots of uses of the word "post" . . . the use of the name in quotes, and an identifying label (law professor) is just a quick-and-dirty way to try to be sure that the hits are "true"; I suspect there are better ways to do this, but that’s the kind of implementation question I happily leave to others . . . ).

Not bad, I suppose -- here, for comparison, are a few searches I just ran:

   "Frankie Lymon" singer 87,900
   "Eugene Volokh" Law professor 33,700
   "Joey Buttafuoco" 77,600
   "Elio Chacon" baseball player 1,910
   "Richard Wagner" composer 584,000
   "Yuri Gagarin" astronaut 91,000

The site could be "seeded" with a couple hundred searches like that. Then, each visitor would put enter his name and identifier, and the results displayed against all the other results and added to the list -- one of the conditions of using the site would have to be that visitors allow the site to display their results in the overall tabulation, so that the list would be growing (and especially at the low end) all the time. Provisions for updating searches, etc. could all be added.

I have a feeling it could work, and could become a pretty interesting site -- and nobody ever lost money betting on peoples’ vanity . . .