Egosurfing

Egosurfing (also called vanity searching, egosearching, egogoogling, autogoogling, self-googling, or simply Googling yourself) is the practice of searching for one's own given name, surname, full name, pseudonym, or screen name on a popular search engine, to see what results appear. It has become increasingly popular with the rise of popular search engines such as Google, as well as free blogging and web-hosting services. It is sometimes combined with third-party tools such as Googlefight when several people egosurf together, or accessed by SMS through services such as 199QUERY (Australia) or AQA (UK) which people SMS their name to a number and a Egosearch is performed on that name and returned (egotexting).

Similarly, an egosurfer is one who surfs the Internet for his own name, to see what, if any, articles appear about himself.

The term was allegedly coined by Sean Carton.

prior to the existence of search engines, a similar practice existed on Usenet, known as kibozing after James "Kibo" Parry, who was well known for replying in a surreal fashion to anyone who mentioned his/her name, on any newsgroup