Who more, who less, has ever practiced egosurfing. That is, to look for oneself in Internetusually through the search engine Googleand see if we appear there, for what reason and what is said about us. It is not simply an act of curiosity, but also a preventive measure in a world where information travels faster than ever and where a negative comment or rumour can have significant consequences, both in professional and personal life.
But if you are lazy with such an activity, you can let it Google does it for you and notifies you every time someone, for whatever reason, mentions you. on the millions of websites of all kinds that your search engine constantly crawls. To do this, you can use Google alert system.
Google Alerts has a broader purpose and is intended to help any user stay up to date on any topic that interests them. But if this is your name, The system will also notify you of any publicationon the websites and social networks that it indexes, to contain it by sending emailsTo set up Google to alert you when your name is mentioned on the Internet, follow these steps:
- Access Google Alerts. Make sure your Google account is logged into the browser.
- In the text box with the message Create an alert about… write your name.
- Click on Show options to configure the frequency of alerts, the type of source, language, region, if you want All results either Only the best results and the email address to which alerts will be sent.
- Click on Create alert.
You can later modify them by clicking on the pencil icon, Edit. If you want the alerts to be strictly limited to your first and last name, in their order, you must put them in quotation marks in the alert. You can also create them for the names of the user accounts you use on the Internetin case they refer to you using that information.
If you find any post that harms your privacy, you can exercise your right to be forgotten from here. If Google agrees, it will deindex that content from its search results.