Me, me, me, me, me, me -- hey, who’s he?

I Google myself. There, I said it. Google is going public and now so am I. What I mean is, when no one is looking I turn that big, powerful search engine on myself. I do it for vanity and pleasure and fear the same way an 11th grader races through a new yearbook looking for his own face. There is a name for this, of course, because this is the 21st century and all: the Ego Google.

The first time I did it was at work, right there at my desk. I got more than 30,000 hits and let me tell you, that took care of the rest of the workday. I wonder what No. 489 is....

But a strange thing happened as I went down the list. An unsettling thing. Not all of those hits were me, Geoff Boucher; some of them were some other Geoff Boucher. It’s not a common name, not at all, and I’m not used to sharing it. I had to find out more about this other person who was conjoined to my Internet identity, linked without choice like Matt Damon and that other guy in that movie, you know, the one I didn’t go see.

I found out all I could about him and starting telling my friends. “I have a Googleganger!” I told my wife, and she gave me that head-tilt, short-sigh and eye-roll face that used to bug me but now I’m used to it.

I put quotation marks around my name and that narrowed the search down to 772 hits, which is not as cool as 30,000 but is still more than my wife gets, and don’t think she hasn’t checked when I wasn’t around. I’ve been writing stories for The Times since 1991 and with some other work -- a modest book I wrote, a Smithsonian story here, a German magazine article there -- there’s an Internet echo that is as pleasing as a scrapbook that reminds you of vacations you took back when you were young and skinny.

Ah, but buzzkill arrives right there near the top of my 772 flashback list. The first hit is a Times story I wrote recently on Eminem. But No. 2 is the other guy. I try to dismiss it, pretend it’s a little radio static during my favorite song.

No, I need to know more. I click and see it’s an essay on a book that’s about ... well, I can’t really tell you what it’s about because I’m not smart enough. This is the first sentence in the essay: “This work has probably had the most enthusiastic reviews since Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s Reading Capital (1965), by the most influential figures on the Left in the trans-Atlantic academic milieu.”

A nightmare. My Googleganger is smarter than I am. A lot smarter. I feel like Gilligan when a double shows up on the island and I absolutely hate Gilligan. The evil Captain Kirk twin, sure, I could live with that, but who wants to be a GoogleGilligan?

I look at my own Google hits to reassure myself. Some are weird. A story I wrote years ago about carpool lanes lives on still on some page devoted to the crusade to abolish the lanes (and you thought I had too much time) and a hate-crime murder I covered in the 1990s is posted on what appears to be a white supremacist website.

This is not making me feel better. I glumly turn my mouse to the other Geoff Boucher.

One page tells me he is a faculty member at the University of Melbourne, which means I don’t need to worry about him picking up my dry cleaning by accident. He spoke at the Marxism 2000 conference and he appears to specialize in philosophy, ethics and government and has devoted considerable study to the works of Hegel.

I find an e-mail address and I send him a short awkward note. I want to ask so many questions. How old is he? Is he taller than me? Does he also put up with dumb people who call him Godfrey? And who exactly is Hegel? The reply e-mail never arrives. Maybe he thinks I’m a stalker or maybe he’s too busy thinking about smart-guy stuff.

I need validation, I need guidance. My Ego Google may need a therapist. There’s only one man who can help me. With trepidation I go to AskJeeves.com and he’s there, of course, waiting for me like a guru on the mount.

I ask him, “Who is Geoff Boucher?” Instead of one answer, Jeeves gives me a screen with 10. Eight of the hits are about me, so I feel good about that, but first two on the list are my brainy counterpart.

I read the first one and I sense that the search engine -- or perhaps my Googleganger -- is offering some wisdom. The page is titled “The Difference in Equality and Inequality by Geoff Boucher.”

Wow, that’s deep. If I ever meet Geoff Boucher maybe he can tell me what it means.

This Geoff Boucher can be reached at geoff.boucher@latimes.com.