We tested this on the same person twice. With a name alone the report came back with four entries. With five details added — a username, a profile link, a website, an employer and a city — the same person's report came back with seventy-eight entries from nine sources, and each one carried a reason it matched.
The difference is not effort. It is that a name is not an identifier and a username very nearly is.
What a bare name can and cannot do
A search engine given a name returns pages containing that name. For a common name that is thousands of people. Nothing in the result says which is you, so the work of separating them falls entirely on you — and a report full of strangers is worth very little even when every entry in it is accurate.
Why one detail changes the shape of the result
- A username is the strongest single thing you can give. Handles are close to unique, and the same handle across platforms is the strongest link there is between accounts.
- A link to any profile is an exact identifier: that page, and the accounts it links to.
- A website means everything on that domain can be treated as yours, including archived copies of it.
- An employer or organisation separates you from a namesake with a different job, because the two words appear on the same page as your name.
- A city does the same for geography.
Any one of them is enough to change the search from a name lookup into a search for a person. Every result that matches a detail says so in plain words, and results matching none of them are grouped separately as likely other people rather than mixed in.
If you would rather not give any
That is a legitimate choice and the search will still run. It is worth knowing what you get: pages about everyone who shares the name, with no way for us to tell them apart. If that is how it comes back, add a detail afterwards and we will run the whole search again at no cost — a report that is thin because there was nothing to search on is not something you should have paid for.