TRY EGO SURFING AND FIND YOURSELF ON THE WEB

Sometimes the Internet is so offbeat I just have to laugh.

My good friend, Debra Rau and I were having supper, and she told me about going "ego surfing." Ego surfing? Apparently, it's the practice of typing your name into popular search engines to see what comes up. If you find people with the exact same name, the idea is to hook up with them. You might send them an e-mail or try to find out more about them.

For others, it's just the thrill of finding how often their own name surfaces in a search of the World Wide Web.

For Debra, the search was brief. She found only one other Debra Rau, from Arizona, who ran a bizarre alternative medicine Web site. This woman is so unlike my friend Debra.

But I have to admit the conversation stirred my curiosity.

I started looking into this craze of "ego surfing" and found numerous mentions across the Internet, dating back several years. There's one mention that "ego surfing" was identified by linguists from the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998, though the practice may date back to the beginning of the Internet.

Let's start with a Web site by the same name: EgoSurf.

www2.egosurf.com

You can ask EgoSurf to find your name, or anything you want for that matter, on the Web.

The search will give you 20 or fewer results. You can tell EgoSurf to keep looking, provided you give them your e-mail address. EgoSurf will then e-mail excerpts from the best pages it finds for free for a week. If you want to search longer, there's a fee, or you can simply start a new EgoSurf search.

EgoSurf suggests you limit your search to a first and last name, with one space in between. Middle names or initials will usually throw off a search, since that's not how most people are known. Remember to type in your name with the proper capitalization.

Remember the Web is more conversational than formal. Of course, if you have an uncommon last name, you can just type that in and see where it goes.

My initial research was fascinating. I showed up several times, but so did at least four other people named Joni Adams:

* One is an RN at University of Southern Indiana.

* One lives in California and is involved with the American Association of University Women and square-dancing.

* One works as a Realtor in Hawaii and sells bumper stickers.

* And another is a marathon runner in West Virginia.

It give me a rather odd feeling to know there's so many Joni Adams' running around.

Of course, I would advice you to go to the popular search engines to learn more about your name.

www.google.com

Google turned up additional "Joni Adams," along with some I already knew about. One was a guidance counselor at a high school in Phoenix, Ariz.

There's even one who runs a dining club for singles in the United Kingdom.

I like Google. It's fast and accurate. I notice by our reports that they scour our Southeast Missouri Hospital pages each month.

If you use search engines at all, you are well aware that you'll get everything that includes the words you are searching for. You might want to narrow the search, by putting quote marks around your name. That way it will only return pages that have particular words in a particular order.

Click on "Search Tips" at the top of a Google page to learn more about refining your search.

www.altavista.com

Try out this popular search engine that powers many other popular searches.

I like this search engine because my Click and Double Click column on the Missourian came in No. 1. (Oh dear, was that an egotistical statement? Is this contagious?) They also suggest you use quotes to refine a search, or use a minus sign to exclude a keyword.

You can also search in English or 25 other languages.

The interesting thing about the different search engines is that they all have different databases, so no two searches will be the same.

Yahoo is one of the largest and oldest Internet directories, so you may get some more choices with this site.

www.yahoo.com

Yahoo is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, but technically, it is not a search engine. It is a directory listing. As such, you can click down through the various directories to find information. But, it is searchable -- thus the confusion.

Here's the way Yahoo describes the difference: "The Yahoo! Directory is a manually created, browsable (and searchable) collection of site listings aggregated by human editors, whereas Google is a completely automated search engine: a robot or spider (computer program) automatically crawls the Web, capturing every word on every page crawled." Yahoo! searches for matches in five areas of the database. It looks for matches with category names, Web site titles and comments, content from individual Web pages, news stories and Web events. Google is actually the search engine used for several of the searches.

You might want to put your name inside quote marks to limit the choices.

Otherwise, it will look for Web pages with either the word Joni or Adams 4,740 choices. However, in quote marks, there are only 65 Web page choices.

www.deja.com

Some people don't realize that messages they leave in chat rooms or newsgroups may be frozen in digital archives.

Gee, I guess I'm behind the times. I didn't realize that Google has acquired "significant assets" from Deja.com, including its archive of more than 500 million messages, which date back to 1995.

Since reaching the agreement, Google has been working to restore access to these messages, which form the largest archive of newsgroups on the Net.

You can browse the Deja.com in general or the 10 biggest groups: alternative, business, computers, humanities, miscellaneous, news, recreation, science, society and talk.

There were no matches for my name in the newsgroups. That's probably good.

Of course, for some people, finding nothing at all for a main Internet site could be a blow to the ego.

If you're a little curious, you may give ego-surfing a spin. Good luck. I'd love to hear from you at jonia@sehosp.org. See you -- or perhaps your namesake -- in Cyberspace.

Joni Adams is the Webmaster at Southeast Missouri Hospital in Cape Girardeau, www.southeastmissourihospital.com.