Do you ever search for yourself at Google? Vanity searches are for pretty vein people huh? I know you’ve probably done it a time or 2, come on, admit it. If you’ve never preformed a self-search, you might want to do so. You’d be surprised what you find. Of coarse, If you have a pretty common name, you’d find tons of results that may or may not be about you. but if you have a name that isn’t as common, or a screen name / email address that isn’t that common, you can sometimes find things you’ve done online going back several years. A simple search using one of my screennames  listed items that went back as far as 1999, such as this map I created for a old PC game.

A pretty good way to keep up with what people are saying about you on the web, or what about you is made available to search engines is to create a Google Alert. If you head over to Google.com/alerts there is a easy form that allows you to have Google email you whenever certain words or phrases are picked up by Google’s crawlers. As you can see the form is pretty easy to fill out.

Google-Alerts1. Just enter your name, screenname, login name, web url or whatever search term you want to be alerted about.

2. Then you have the option of picking what type of item you wanted to be alerted about. News items, blogs, video etc

3. How often? Choices are Once a day, once a week, or as it happens.

After that, just enter the email address where you want to receive the alerts and your on your way. Whenever your name is mentioned online, you’ll be notified. Google alerts are pretty useful if you have a website or blog and want to find out when people link to you. Put your URL and whenever it is linked too, you’ll get an alert