Ego (aka Vanity) Searching – Do you Egosurf?

I have a confession to make.

I have a Google alert for the term “blogpond”. Today I got such an alert that took me to a results page entitled “Ego Surf – ego surfing without the guilt”. The results weren’t even for me, but somehow I ended up with the alert anyway.

(A word of explanation here – a vanity or ego search is when an individual types his or her name into a search engine like Google to see what what links are showing up for their name and/or website).

So “cool”, I thought – I’ll bite & I proceeded to search for “blogpond” and “blogpond.wordpress.com”. Groovy – I came up with 5,686 “ego points”. Down the bottom they give you a count “we massaged 1195 egos today”. So then I decided to dig around the site a little more. Imagine my surprise when I hit the home page and there for the whole world to see was the result of my “ego surf” (Oh the guilt!), and to add insult to injury my meagre 5,686 ego points labelled me as a “deadbeat” (the shame)!

Well, it’s all good fun. But I imagine this could be very popular with the blogging community (eg Alister Cameron writes about his vanity search results). It’s a little slow but I think users would be happy to wait as this is a “ME” thing, and the results have to be as comprehensive as possible, after all .

Want to know where to go? You can find it at www.egosurf.org and the other slogan they use is “know your place”.

What’s your description “flop”, “washout”, “wreck”, “flunkey”, “stuck-up”, “loser”, “pompous”, “stiff” – Yep folks go get your ego massaged or annihilated now. Love to hear your results.

(P.S. My husband thinks this is the most useless post I’ve written & that I’ve lost the plot, but we’re allowed to digress occasionally aren’t we? Do you think this is useless?)