I googled myself today.
It had been a while since I googled myself to see what the hell was out there about me. Maybe someone ripping me or maybe just stuff I had worked on.
So, after putting my name in quotes, it came back with “about” 1,710 hits. Not too shabby, I thought. However, I find, a lot of these are search engines that found a specific word in an article — and usually has nothing to do with anything I wrote about.
The best, however, are those town sites. You know, the ones that fish out there for certain town names. But it’s for a town, say in Indiana with the same name as a town I cover. So all of my stuff shows up there. Good times!
I did find an interesting thing, though. An article I did about a baseball player from my area was used on baseball-almanac.com. His quote is at the top of the page with the attribute to the paper as well as my name after it. That’s pretty cool considering it’s a site I actually use at times.
Apparently I’m also a doctor. Maybe I should open a practice in town.
I switched over to images and found a lot of photos that I’ve taken over the years that were in newspapers. That’s kind of cool to see that, actually. Or, photos associated with stories I’ve done more recently.
The groups was rather funny, as it brought me back to the days of when I was younger on the Internet and got into several different groups as a good discussion thing. Fantasy sports and whatnot. Pretty interesting. Now, thankfully, we have message boards and blogs!!!
News is, well, duh, news. Mostly things I’ve written recently. This is a nice tool because in the past I’ve been able to see where other papers have lifted things and given attribution. It’s always interesting to see if your work is ever picked up by a small newspaper somewhere that just needed a nugget of info about the things we’ve covered. At least they give attribution!
And, nothing on Froogle, which is good. If I was on there, it would mean I was for sale. And that wouldn’t be good to find out!
And so ends another day of being googled. If you’ve never done it, you should. You might find some funny things out there with your name on it. Could be funny. Or not so funny!
Hi PJ
If you want you can now join an online address book like WikiWorldBook.com or Ziggs.com that offer you a Search Alert service, that warns you when you’ve been Googled.
This can be done by joining one of the growing number of online address books for people that place your name (on your profile) high up in the search engine results and provide a search alert service – for example either wikiworldbook.com or ziggs.com.
When someone Googles your name, the profile will be clearly visible in the search engine results and be an obvious target to investigate. The moment they have clicked your profile, you will be alerted by email with such information as the searchers geographical location plotted on a Google map, the name of the business associated with the IP address if there is one, the keyword used to find you and the search engine being used.
Of course it won’t pick up every time you are being Googled because it depends on your profile being clicked – but if its truely you they are searching for, the chances are good they will click your profile.