This is kinda weird. I just got the following email from Google:

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The weird thing is that I use my Hotmail account for my email for GameDev.net, not my Gmail account. I have no clue how Google associated my GameDev.net profile with my Gmail or Google+ accounts. I myself never added anything. And when it says "you've added Google Authorship markup to your pages" I have no clue what "pages" it's talking about (I have none in my Google+ profile). How on earth did Google know I wrote this post (4 years ago!)?

Black magic, I tell you...

Google knows everything.

In reply to someone saying "Pics or net never happened": Google has photos from everywhere to prove it.

They're slowly acclamating you to how much they really know about you so you don't find it as outrageous when you find out it has video of you taking a bath with lavender bath salts and vanilla candles as you listened to enya this weekend.

Oh my... this is getting creepier... So looking at the list of pages it's associating with me, it's found stuff by me on Wikipedia... It's creepy because there are a bajillion Michael Bradshaws in the world, and it's somehow correctly found me and my stuff.

[quote name='Cornstalks' timestamp='1358185069' post='5021472']
The weird thing is that I use my Hotmail account for my email for GameDev.net, not my Gmail account. I have no clue how Google associated my GameDev.net profile with my Gmail or Google+ accounts. I myself never added anything.[/quote]

You are absolutely sure you never set your hotmail address as the fall-back address in case you lose your gmail password?

If not, it is probably following the link to your blog from your GDNet profile. And that blog's about page links directly to your Google+ profile...

The weird thing is that I use my Hotmail account for my email for GameDev.net, not my Gmail account. I have no clue how Google associated my GameDev.net profile with my Gmail or Google+ accounts. I myself never added anything.

You are absolutely sure you never set your hotmail address as the fall-back address in case you lose your gmail password?

Ah, now that I have done. Yes, my Hotmail account is set as that for my Gmail account. But even then, Google shouldn't even know my GameDev.net account's email (it's not publicly listed, so how would it know the email I use for GameDev.net matches my backup email for my Gmail account?).

If not, it is probably following the link to your blog from your GDNet profile. And that blog's about page links directly to your Google+ profile...

I've thought of that, but then there's the Wikipedia stuff too (I guess it's possible I used my Gmail email for my Wikipedia account... I dunno if I did or not, that was years ago and I don't even remember my Wikipedia username (I just had to look it up)). But even then, that's a pretty incredible feat. GameDev.net is a good sized community, but it's just a tiny speck in the Internet, and I'd expect other GameDev.net users to be getting the same kind of emails (maybe I'm just the first? People, let me know if you get this).

Ah, swiftcoder, you seem to be right. One way to get this is to add a <a href="[profile_url]?rel=author">Google</a> tag from my webpage (which was probably added to my blog by the template), and then "add a reciprocal link back from your profile to the site(s) you just updated."

Yup, that seems to be how it did it. It probably followed the author profile link (my Cornstalks profile), found the link to my website, and then linked it to my Google+ profile. The weird part is that the second link I posted there (the one analyzing my Cornstalks profile) says "Error: Author profile page does not have an authorship link to a Google Profile." and yet, it has linked my GameDev.net profile to my Google+ profile.

Surprisingly, it hasn't found any StackOverflow stuff, but somehow managed to get some of my Wikipedia stuff...

Fact: GameDev has a google +1 button at the bottom of the thread.

Fact: If you're logged into your Google account, google can automaticly detect what pages you view if that page contains a +1. (Facebook does the same thing with 'Like'). Poor theory: Maybe they somehow detect you 'submitting' the text in some way?

Stack Overflow doesn't have any +1 buttons, so they can't track what pages you view there.

Wikipedia doesn't either... but doesn't wikipedia publicly show IP addresses of contributions - or is that only with anonymous edits?

More theory: If wikipedia says, "This page was editted on <timestamp> by <ip>", and Google says, "<ip> accessed a different webpage with a +1 button two seconds later, and the user was logged into their google profile..." they could automatically put the two together, and with Wikipedia being one of the largest sites in the world, Google might've created a few special web crawling routines to harvest data from it. They wouldn't bother with a site like StackOverflow, but they probably would with Reddit.

Solution: Tin foil body armor

Stack Overflow doesn't have any +1 buttons, so they can't track what pages you view there. Wikipedia doesn't either... Doesn't wikipedia publicly show IP addresses of contributions - or is that only with anonymous edits? If wikipedia says, "This page was editted on <timestamp> by <ip>", and Google says, "<ip> accessed a different webpage with a +1 button two seconds later, and the user was logged into their google profile..." they could automatically put the two together, and with Wikipedia being one of the largest sites in the world, Google might've created a few special web crawling routines to harvest data from it. Just theorizing.

Decent theory, but I have a dynamic IP from my ISP, and my contributions to Wikipedia were about 5 or 6 years ago (long before Google+), so I wouldn't expect my IPs to match.

TBH, the Internet is getting scarier.

Pretty much the reason why I don't post stuff on FB page, or link anything to anything else. Every account gets their own email address.