Vanity search

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Posted by: stak
Posted on: 2007-10-07 11:12:12

So I was a little bored this morning and decided to do a vanity search to see what the web thinks of me. Since I have a rather "unique" name, it wasn't until the 3rd page until I hit the first false positive. That is, the first 27 hits on Google did actually refer to me. The 28th was some random PDF, then there were a bunch more valid results, and the next false positive was at #45. After that it was hit-and-miss.

A surprising number of the hits were just old newsgroup postings that I made that seem to have replicated across the web. And my old ticalc programs resurfaced as they always do. There was also a large set of pages relating in some way to the ACM finals that I was at last year.

There were three hits that were new and/or interesting. One was my site entry at OpenIDDirectory.com. Apparently they just crawl the web looking for sites that support OpenID and add them to their database with a short description. You can then "take ownership" of your site entry by embedding a MicroID on your site to prove ownership. MicroIDs seem kinda cool, so it's something I'll keep an eye on and see how it evolves.

The second was that apparently two people have added my site to their del.icio.us bookmarks. I think I know who one of them is, but have never (to my knowledge) met the other person, who was the one to originally add the link. It's always nice to know random people do stumble across my site. (Hey, it's called a vanity search for a reason).

The third link was a recently made post on the IBM DeveloperWorks forums. Apparently somebody was trying to figure out how to use jar2jxe (which I helped work on at IBM) and ran across my site. I found it amusing that the poster said "... he might reply, or better yet, post here". I was tempted to post something but I figured the guy had already found what he was looking for since the thread is already a month old. Also, if I posted something and it got indexed by Google and turned up the next time I did a vanity search, that would just be weird.

Posted by Edrie at 2007-11-16 20:29:32

When you did your vanity search did you use Technorati? I know that sounds a tad ignorant but you have to realize that I've been out of touch with everything tech for almost seven years now.

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Posted by stak at 2007-11-17 00:37:36

Nope. I don't think my blog is read by enough people to even be noticed by Technorati.

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