Saturday 25 October 2008

Who is Googling You?

If you want the answer to the question who's Googling you, you need to register with a free website like WikiWorldBook, which is a People Search engine with Global Address Book.

Essentially, the service enables you to create a profile which is easily found by anyone looking for you using Google or another search engine. You are sent a Search Alert email if someone Googles you and clicks through to your profile. You should be able to see the geographical location of the searcher, their IP address, what business or organization they are at if that's where they are based, the actual search engine and the keywords used to find you. You can see a screenshot below in the previous blog.

Some people have said that this is controversial because its breaching peoples privacy. Here at WikiWorldBook , we think its only supposedly controversial because its a new technology that most people aren't aware of yet. If its alright that employers or organizations like Universities can search on the web for information about employees and students, then maybe it's alright if those people know that someone is looking for them - especially if they are trying to find out something negative about them. We think this helps redress the balance.

Friday 17 October 2008

Find Out When You’ve Been Googled.

Every day, around 50 million people are Googled by people or organisations. Have you ever wondered if someone has been Googling you?


Well, wonder no more because, with Search Alert, now you can know.


This works in a very simple way:-


  • When you register with us, you create a unique page with your profile on it (which might show as little as your name).

  • Because we are a “big” enough site, your profile page will be ranked high in any Google results – perhaps even number one – unless you have a very common name.

  • Anyone looking for you will therefore easily see your WikiWorldBook profile page and want to view it.

  • When they view that page, we capture some of their details, which allows you to see what time and what day they Googled you and where they Googled you from, which we plot on a Google Map.

  • Every time you are Googled, we save these details in a report for you so you can keep track of how often it is happening to you. What’s more, you can choose if you want an email notification of every time it happens!



Wednesday 8 October 2008

WikiWorldBook – And Why You Need To Be On It.

The internet age has fundamentally changed society and business. Half our lives are now controlled by the mechanism that is known as the web, whether we personally engage with it or not. We can engage with it for our personal banking or social activities, like sending email, dating, sharing photos, booking holidays or flights, or communicating with friends via various social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace etc). And for business, like business banking, company websites, email etc. And if you don’t engage with it at all, you are still there, in friends blogs, in company literature, in Government documentation etc. Essentially, people’s personal and business lives are becoming more transparent and they have a choice about whether they ignore this irreversible trend or engage with it in order to exert a degree of control over it.

Managing Your Identity

The effect that this has now had is that when people want to find out about someone else, they now Google them – that is to say that they carry out a search for that person using a search engine. “You’ve been Googled” is now part of our everyday vocabulary for good reason, because it is a highly effective way of finding out about someone very quickly. That is why, if you are at all concerned about your identity you should be concerned about what people can find out about you from the first few pages of a Google search using your name.

No one can prevent what results show up in the results of a Google search, but you can make sure that one of the very first results that jumps out at someone searching for you is one that you have planted for them to find. That is where WikiWorldBook comes in.

WikiWorldBook is a free online Address Book where you can create your own profile in order to tell people what you want them to know about yourself. It is an open site, so all the information on your profile page shows up in the search engine results. Its benefits include:-

  • Be easily found – via search engine searches.

  • Be easily contacted – without having to reveal your contact details (we hide your email address). Anyone contacting you uses our internal messaging system which then generates an email to your email account, so the message sender never sees your email address (in effect an “email gateway”).

  • Manage Your identity – via a profile you create, which can tell people as little as your name or as much as you want them to know about yourself, including your interests, the industry in which you work, your position at work, your website address, even your life philosophy.

  • We make it easy for people, like old friends and colleagues, to contact you by not requiring that they register with us before they message you (we are one of the very few sites that allow this).

  • We have a new powerful spam filter which means that you should not receive any spam at all – therefore you are only contacted by the people you want to hear from.

WikiWorldBook also has its own people search engine which searches the web to provide highly filtered results for people searches which are broken down into different segments, to make it easier to digest the results if there are many of them. The website also offers the ability to Trace old friends and relatives, read or create interesting blogs, a discussion forum and an expanding business and product directory, where you can find and make reviews.


Conclusion

In conclusion, if you want to control what people read about you before they read something else elsewhere then provide them with an easy source of reference using WikiWorldBook. If you want to be easily found and contacted without having to reveal your contact details, use WikiWorldBook.


See the WikiWorldBook home page here

See a profile here

See the Google results for that profile here