8 Tools to Track Your Footprints on the Web
Last week we looked at how easy it is to leave footprints on the Web; today we'll show you how easy it is to track them.
Although search engines provide a great starting point when you're searching for someone online, with all of the new social sites that have popped up over the past few years, they're often just not enough.
In our recent State of Blog Search 2009 post we discussed the various reasons you may choose to use any or all of the following blog search tools: Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ice Rocket, Ask.com Blogsearch, and FriendFeed. While these blog search engines are great to fill specific needs, they're also another great place to look for your footprints on the Web.
However, you can drill down even more.
1. BlogPulse: Trends in the Blogosphere
Part of Nielsen-Online, BlogPulse highlights the top trends in the blogosphere and is mostly used to determine the hottest topics on the Web and how they got to be that way. But, its value as a personal monitoring tool can not be disregarded. Search for your name then grab the RSS feed to see who is talking about you and what they're saying.
2. Pipl: Searching the Invisible Web
Pipl claims to search the deep or invisible Web to find documents, blog entries, photos, publicly available information that other search engines don't serve up. It's a great, fast search engine that we like; the only disadvantage is it offers no RSS feed.
3. Spy: Watching what Happens on the Web
According to the site, Spy can "listen in on the social media conversations you're interested in." This clean visualization search tool watches Twitter, FriendFeed, blog posts, Google reader shares and Flickr for any term you want. An RSS feed is available.
4. Serph: The Social Web Right Now
A brilliant tool for searching the social Web, Serph shows you what is being said about you "right now." Serph gathers results from blog search engines, social media sites, social news sites and social bookmarking sites and offers an RSS feed for the results.
5. Social Mention: Mentions of your Name on the Social Web
Another great tool for searching the social Web, Social Mention offers a quick glance at mentions of your name on the Web. Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. Slower than Serph, but occasionally offers different results. An RSS feed is available.
6. Monitter: Tracking Twitter
Monitter is one of the coolest looking monitoring tools for Twitter and one of the most useful. We've written about it before and although most people are using Twitter's own search tool for search and alerts on Twitter, Monitter offers a little bit more. Giving you the option to search for three different keywords at once, Monitter is great if you want to keep your eye out for mentions of your name, your username and your company all at the same time. It also offers an RSS feed.
7. BoardTracker 2.0: The Ultimate Search Tool for Forums
BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alert system that offers relevant results quickly. One of our favorite search tools for forums and message boards, BoardTracker currently tracks in excess of 1.2 billion posts.
8. Google Alerts: The big G
We couldn't end this post without mentioning Google Alerts, although likely most of you are familiar with it. Although Microsoft and Yahoo have alert tools, Google's offering beats them hands down. It offers e-mail and RSS alerts for any set of keywords including your name.
While we're still waiting for that perfect product that will associate our names with our brands with our usernames, and send us the results instantly, we don't expect to see it anytime soon (although we've got our fingers crossed), but we do hope that this list provides you with some alternatives to track your footprints across the Web.
If you've got a great tool you want to share, please let us know in the comments.
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Actually the best way to keep track of your web footprints is Spokeo people search. It will search across all major social networks and the Web to dig out your activities on them.
ZapTxt beats google or yahoo alerts any day of the week. Even follows you to email or phone if you are offline on IM
I use Google Alerts to know who are searching about my blog ,backtype also does well to track the reply to comemnts made by us.
You missed http://tweetgrid.com, which will allow you to track up to 9 keywords or hashtags at the same time, and tweet directly from their interface.
even i used tweetgrid.com......but i appreciate this piece is all worth
Great. You just know that some deeply unbalanced person is using this to stalk an ex.
very great article ! thanks :)
You forgot a new one:
http://veryrecent.com
Very Recent combines social media search, blog search and news search into one compact interface.
I recommend http://whostalkin.com- easy to track your activities on Plurk/Twitter/blogs, etc plus you do not need an account to start your search.
Now let's find a way to erase all my footprints :d
BrowserSpy can also show you a lot of stuff about your online presence.
http://browserspy.dk/
This is very similar to what I had written in October 2008, feel its worthy to add a link here -
http://techpp.com/2008/10/31/looking-for-you-on-the-net/
Really useful article,thanks :)
Think you can also use samepoint.com's social media search...
Good list.. kudos...
Suggest to include http://AskTwiTR.com searches Twitter in real time for Pic/Movie/Tags/Topic and display results on Google Map.
-E
FairShare is a way to track where your content goes once you publish it. You can give FairShare your feed, and in return your get a feed that shows you all the folks who quote and copy your blog.
http://beta.fairshare.cc
Now let's find a way to erase all my footprints :=)
I use Google Alerts to know who are searching about my blog ,backtype also does well to track the reply to comemnts made by us.
Yes, now let's find ways too remove all of this stuff. Especially from directories like PeopleFinders because this is starting to get very scary.
I work in recruiting, the sourcing side. For those unfamiliar, sourcers are the people who go find the talented people for open positions. Some of the tools mentioned above are extremely useful for us. I wrote a similar article on this topic from a sourcer's viewpoint here Conversation Monitter-ing and Spy-ing. I would also add the following tools maltego (desktop client), backtype, retweetradar (created by the same guy who created Spy, Ben Hedrington).
Also Wink, Pipl, Spoke, Spock are fairly useful. Silobreaker is pretty cool too, more focused on news.
PowerTwitter allows you to search right from the twitter interface, and hone in on keywords or people.
Boardtracker does a decent job of searching forums as well. Don't forget feedmysearch to turn your Google web searches into RSS feeds.
Actually, it looks like monitter allows way more than 3 simultaneous queries. In the bottom right hand corner there are + and - button's which allow you to add and remove what seems to be unlimited amount of search columns. Really cool!
These are great tools to grab enough info about a website or a person. Beware of those sites that aim to help you finding backgrounds and they charge you high fees for doing what you can also do it at your discretion.
Great post. Thank you!
This is very helpful. thanks!
I find google alerts to be the best it has always done a good job for me while remaining simple and to the point.
nice post:)pipl was news for me..
Really interesting article, inspired me to write my own blog about online reputation.
http://ip-brands.com/blog/?p=356
I would like to recommend http://www.123people.com - people search, social networking search, news and blog search all displayed in a dynamic hub for your convenience.
I had run into many of these but it was nice to seem them collected into one place. Thanks.
that's a real useful list, perfect for watching your online exposure.
id def add backtype.com to that list; its useful for following blog comments.
FairShare is a circuit and its contents once it is published. You can give your FairShare source, and showing that all people meeting and a copy of your blog.
This list is really helpful. Thanks for posting.
Spy looks interesting, but is not very friendly to view. Need to have a user control on the refresh. Actually it would have been better if only a part of the screen changed....rather than the whole page scrolling down.
Nice post as usual.