TimesToCome

I mentioned in passing that it is odd that people search for my name once or twice a month, visit my blogs, then never leave a note or drop an email. I never know if it is an old friend, new friend or someone just curious about me? No matter, any information I have splashed all over the web is public. But someone asked how I knew people were Googling me?

So how do you know if people are watching you? I find out from my website logs. Every log entry that comes from a search engine, shows the terms some one used to find your website.

timestocome.com-Jul-2008:00.00.00.000 - - [06/Jul/2008:14:43:13 -0600] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 2206 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Linda+MacPhee-Cobb” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SU 3.011; (R1 1.6); .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; MAXTHON 2.0)”

I zero’d out the ip number of the searcher. You will have an ip number, date, search terms, browser, and search engine.

You can then search for the ip number in the logs and see what other pages that person visited.

So are you curious about who is curious about you?

You can go to Arin enter the ip number of your visitor and you might get some information back. More likely he/she will just be part of a pool of ip numbers from some isp, but it never hurts to try and occasionally you get lucky.

You can put that ip number in your web browser and see if there is a website hosted there.

You can also check your emails and see if that ip number turns up in an email that was sent to you.

If you are worried about people stalking you on the web, keep your real name off the web. Seriously I don’t see any harm in it. Tell me that you, the reader, has never Googled someone you’ve run across. I thought not. You were just curious, and I expect your visitor was as well and perhaps just embarrassed to tell you.

Suppose you want to Google someone, visit the websites that turn up, but not be identified as having Googled that person? That is easy.

Google the person in one browser, cut and paste the link into another. The search term shows up when you click the links Google servers up. It helps webmasters know what kind of information people are looking for on their site. If people are looking for information on apples and I’m not covering apples much on my site, I know I need to fix that.

Now if you want to know who is talking about you online you’ll want to set up a Google Alert. I have them set up for my name and for the website domains.

Remember, always, every step you take online is logged.

Resist the temptation to get too clever setting up a website with your name on it to see who is Googling you. It might be your future spouse or your future employer who is doing the search.