I suppose this scarcely yet counts as a trend

But I wonder if people are vanity-googling Google Scholar, or if there is some system of notification set up or something? Looking at it it looks as though one can set up alerts?

A little while ago I had a message via academia.edu from somebody saying that they heard they were cited in [piece by me, which oddly, was a chapter within a book, rather than a freestanding item] and it didn't seem at all likely? And I looked it up and there is absolutely no citation to any work by this person, which would indeed, given their field of endeavour and what the chapter is actually about, be extremely improbable; and also, no citation to a person of same or similar name active at the period about which I was writing. But there were one or two names which, it occurred to me, might possibly have been OCRed from a scan into something resembling the name.

But anyway, I passed on, just thinking, weird.

And today, a younger scholar who has just published a book tweeted about somebody having noticed from Google Scholar that this new book references theirs, and wishing to know whether the reference is positive or not.

Which is HUH?

Surely they could do a quick search via Google Books themself? (the book is available and can be searched thusly, I've just checked.)