The Vanity Search

Image by Tumisu via Pixabay

I recommend that you do a vanity search. Actually, many privacy experts also recommend it. A vanity search means to search one’s own name on Internet search engines. Yes, engines plural. On Google and even the ones you might not use (Bing, Baidu, Yahoo!, Yandex, Ask.com, and DuckDuckGo. Put your name in quotes and search. Try variations on your name.

Why? Well, the vanity part is to see that you have an online presence. Sometimes a nice ego boost. But there is also the bad side, such as finding out things you don’t want online are online, including photos (yes, image searches are part of this as well as blogs, news, etc.) comments and reviews you left on sites.

I do this regularly. I find little things – a comment about a T.S. Eliot poem on a blog and one about inner journeys.

Sometimes I find that someone has legitimately reposted something I wrote. With this one, I found a new virtual friend with similar interests. (We even share a mantra.) I have also found reposts that I don’t endorse – like someone who duplicates this entire blog on another site in Russia.

Image searches also turn up photos of mine being reused – with proper attribution – like my little Buddha on the tricycle.org website, and one of my beach photos, a little bit of Miss America in Atlantic City, and one of my many photos of windows – this one is of Edgar Allen Poe’s dorm room (probably) at UVA.

Room No. 13 on West Range of UVA’s main campus. I doubt that Ed had a raven statue in his room.

I even discovered that several sad little “blogs” that I started back in the day still exist. The Internet never forgets. Maybe I should delete it? Instead, I added something new to this little poetry thing.

I don’t use guest posts by other people on my blogs but I have been asked to write or add content to other people’s blogs.  I forgot about this guest post I did in 2016 where I was asked to write about Skills That Will Help You Find Life After Teaching.

I think I may have too much of an online presence. I don’t remember doing this webinar on podcasting but apparently, I even got paid for doing it.

I found a bunch of legitimate articles I have written. This was for a journal in 2013 when I was working at NJIT and really doing a lot with MOOCs. (those are Massive Open Online Courses) I found another presentation I did on “MOOCs For Pre-College Career Exploration.”

I found lots of people simply linking to things I’ve done, like this research guide at a university linking to my Endangered New Jersey blog.

I find an assortment of photos and bios of me. Here is one from the Tiferet journal that has published several of my poems.

I don’t count the things I find in a search that I already know are there. I have been posting poetry writing prompts and poems that poets have submitted on my Poets Online website. What is more interesting is when I find that someone has reused one of the prompts and one of my poems. In this case, they didn’t ask to use it (not that I recall) but at least there is a link back to my website.

I always find something new about myself when I do a vanity search. I haven’t shared any bad or unpleasant ones, but that is out there too for all of us. Make sure you check out yourself.