How to Stroke Yourself at Google (egosurfing)

I’ve always thought that Google, the company whose corporate motto is “do no evil” has the power to know anything about anyone, especially if that person is fond of going online. With Google’s search capabilities, you would be surprised at what would pop up when you do a search on a person’s name. What does Google find on you?

Enter ego surfing, or vanity searching.

How popular you are with Google would depend on how much you go online, whether you actively use your real identity online in blogs, forums, and mailing lists, and whether you’re interesting enough to be written about or mentioned by other people.

Hey, that’s why they’re called vanity searches

On the Main Google Search

It could be as easy as keying in each name (first name, surname) of yours, but if you own a common name, some results might pop up that are quite far from information on you. One solution would be searching for your name in quotes.

For instance, a search on John Dvorak would come up with 4.5 million results for the articles and citations of tech writer John C. Dvorak, but this might include results for the “dvorak” keyboard (especially because the name “John” is pretty common. If you used an exact phrase to search, to “John C. Dvorak” for instance, then you would be narrowing down the results to sites that cite or list John’s name with the middle initial “C.”

Some sites would also list your name in reverse order, where the surname comes first. This is usually true of official, government, or school announcements. For this case, one could search “Dvorak, John” and Google will list about 20,000 sites that cite John’s name in that format. These are usually biographies and book references, which cite author names surname-first.

Now it would depend on your preferences in listing your name how much you can find out by using different possible combinations. If you’re not as active online as Mr. Dvorak is, you will likely find only about a couple of pages on you. Here’s where you can use your other online identities to search.

For instance, if you run a blog or a website, you can check out the sites that link to you by using the “link” operator

link:dvorak.org

This search would bring up a list of sites that reference John’s blog in any way.

Using Google Blogsearch

If you’re a blogger, social networker, or writer, you can probably get more results by using the Google Blogsearch tool. This is because blogsearch is more frequently updated than the Google main search, and it gets information from blog RSS feeds, so it’s easier to filter and acquire content from blogs.

Blogsearch results can also be arranged by chronological order or even by relevance, so you can see the most recent posts people have made talking about you or who have been linking to your site recently. Relevance would mean the authority of the blog, and how close a match to your query the blog post is.

Doing a blogsearch on “John C. Dvorak” would bring up a list of recent blog entries that reference John’s full name.

You can also key in just your blog’s URL, and Google will give you a list of blogs that recently linked to you.

A search on “link:dvorak.org/blog” brings up a list of sites that recently linked to John’s blog.

Also Try Google Images

Vanity searches on Google may not only be about names and blogs. You can also use Google images to look for sites that contain images using your name as caption.

If you don’t appear in any of these searches, then congratulations. You’re probably keeping a low profile and thus out of Google’s radar. But of course, if you’re vain enough, you’d probably want Google to index as much about you possible!

And for those of you that are lazy and vain…

Google Alerts can ego surf automatically for you

Google makes everything easy don’t they? Simply go to Google Alerts enter your name and set an alert schedule for the emails they’ll send you. You can automatically check Google News, Web Search and even Groups. This is also a handy way to keep track of your competition online if you run a business or blog.

Happy hunting!