Finding Your Writing Online

Use search engines to scour the Internet for plagiarism of your works, mentions of your name, blog and website and every variation of those elements. I know I've written about this practice before. However, if you do it regularly, every so often a surprise will pop up. This is because new material, like databases, come online and eventually register in search engines' indexes. The engines themselves are always changing, sometimes improving; and they begin to catch older references that had escaped notice in the past. Only a fraction of the Internet is "visible" at any given time.

Search engines also make specialized searches available. These find material that you may have not seen. The results can be slightly jarring. At least, one was for me. Crank up the Wayback Machine, Sherman: someone ran a Yahoo search for this site's domain name, linked to any educational or governmental sites. I found the resulting page in a Google Alert. The Yahoo search string looks something like this: "linkdomain:writers-edge.info AND (site:.edu OR site:.gov)". Feeds That Matter for Writing was familiar, but one from Eastern Illinois University took me by surprise.

Apparently a graduate student in an English program had researched women writing on the web. She gave mini-reviews of several women's blogs, including A Writer's Edge. I'm not certain whether to be amused or aghast at the assertion that I have "a bit dorky sense of humor". It is good, however, to discover other people's reactions to your writing, even if two years late. Shakirova's description of the blog as "a compilation of mostly reviews of the new books the author read and offering the list of websites on poetry and writing" displays where the blog has evolved from. I hope the visual description is still accurate:

The imagery and colors are appropriately arranged and make the site easy to navigate. The site, although more educational than entertaining, is targeted toward certain audience interested in books and writing.