Monday, June 11, 2001		Article

MANY a times you might have logged on to the Internet to learn about numerous things extending from information on weather to automobiles, investments, news and music reviews. But have you ever relied on the Net to keep a track on an even more compelling topic – your own self.

Yes! Net veterans call it ego surfing. It means scanning the Net, its databases as well as print media looking for references to one’s own name.

For those who have already tried it must have found out that, it is both an idle exercise and a hair-raising demonstration of the depth of data in the Web’s depository.

The Oxford English dictionary identified the term Ego surfing in 1998, although the practice traces its roots to the beginning of the Internet. Some Web heads consider it as a dangerously addictive act of throwing one’s name into a search engine and seeing what is dished out. The result can produce just about anything.

Reasons to ego surf

Firstly, it makes you aware of any reprehensible deeds or wrong impressions that someone might be creating using your name. Also it lets you know how accessible you are to the world. It also makes a surfer accessible to his or her past friends and acquaintances. Who doesn’t like to be aware about what friends, colleagues or family members surfing the Net read about ‘you’?

And still more wouldn’t you like to know about your cyber reputation?

How to ego surf

Well it’s quite simple. Put your name within quotation marks and surf. If you’re looking for mention of your name, combine it with places you’ve worked in or the name of the institution you have studied in.

You can use any search engine to get the details about yourself, although "meta engines" such as dogpile.com and metafetcher.com, which submit your name to several search engines, are the preferred ones.

Another site that’s convenient for persons to search is The Ultimates. It’s nothing more than a page from which you can enter into several established search sites at once. In fact, if you punch in your information into this site on the left side of the page first, a script will copy the information into the other sites automatically. Then just hit the search button for each site that will open in a separate window.

The Ultimates uses the sites Yahoo!, WhoWhere, Switchboard, Four11, Infospace and Worldpage. But which one is better is the question?

A search engine, http://egosurf.com, offers one service most others do not. It continues to search for your name for full one week and sends you the results via e-mail if it is able to trace you somewhere in the cyber-world. Before Egosurf.com arrived two years ago, people used search engines like Yahoo! (www.Yahoo.com), Infoseek (www.Infoseek.com) and Altavista (www.Altavista.com).

The result

Often ego surfers "discover" themselves in stories, engagement announcements, phone directories and even fan pages. Many are alarmed to see the messages that they had once posted to newsgroups and chat rooms in private being made accessible to everyone globally. Most of them do not realise that a lot of what they do online is archived and indexed. But actually the real problem is that it can be quite distressing to someone who had once, say, indulged in sending an obscene mail to someone.

A more common result is the discovery of other persons with the same name. One egosurf.com user was startled to discover his name attached to both a doctor in London and a convict in Pakistan.

Madeleine Begun Kane observes that ego surfing, "allows us to imagine that millions of persons are reading our work, laughing at our every word, applauding our brilliance. While it can be educational, ego surfing is mostly rooted in simple vanity."

However there is only one real danger in ego-surfing, coming up empty-handed. You might go out expecting to see yourself all over the place and still find no matches at all. This can really dent your ego.

Now that you know the outcome for punching in your names into search engines like AltaVista.com, Hotbot.com, and FindTonsOfCrap.com, I think it’s fair to say that the Internet can turn up something, if not everything, on just about anybody, if you’re persistent enough.