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egoSurf is a very useful and quite popular tool which uses a complex algorithm to perform a special query and gives you so-called “ego points” or “ego ranking” as a result of that query. Basically, it finds links pointing to a “web resource” which can be your blog or your home-site (or any other site for that matter) with an addition of relation to the “search phrase” that you also must provide beside entering your home-site’s or a blog’s web-address. It supports Google, Yahoo, and MSN search-engines (with an option to specify the country version), while it can also search in del.icio.us and in Technorati sites. It also keeps tracking of rankings over time, so it’s easy to see how some site (as mentioned, in relation to a particular term or phrase) ranks over time.
So how does all this work in reality? Well, it’s all pretty simple: you just need to choose a search phrase (for instance your or your company’s name) and enter a blog’s/home-site’s web-address (yours or any other one), then egoSurf checks the search-engines’ results against these addresses to identify a hit or a miss and after it finishes with its calculation, it shows you where the site that you entered appears in the SERPs. In other words it surfs for a specified search term or phrase, looking for links to a web-address (or web-addresses) that you have entered. Additionally, you can enter multiple web-sites at the same time (i.e for the same query), you just need to seperate them with commas or spaces. Further, it also allows you to use a patented “deep search” technology, which using a “one degree of separation”, looks at each page retrieved by the search engine(s), and seek out links to specified site(s). This deep searching feature generates even more obscure references.
Here’s an example of one such search:
Search term = ivan tadej (that’s my name; it always changes it to lower-caps)
Web resource = users.volja.net/tayiper, tadej-ivan.50webs.com, ivan-tadej.atspace.com, www.senserely.com (my three home-site variants + Senserely; note that you must ommit the “http://” prefix)
As you can see, I used my “full name” as a search phrase (i.e. ivan tadej, but of course I could also input just “ivan” or just “tadej”), and below I entered my three home-site variants’ URLs and Senserely community’s URL, seperated by a single comma and a space between each one. Few things to note. As first, regarding the search term(s)/phrase(s): it says in its FAQ that in some cases it works better with quotes around it. And as second in regards to a “web resource”: it is that often you shouldn’t enter the sites with the “www.” part, since the domain-name is well enough, and that way it allows you to match any subdomains too. You may of course also specify the folder as a part of URL, as I in fact did for the “users.volja.net” URL above (the first one of the three), where “tayiper” is a sub-folder on that server.
So as the conclusion of this “book-entry”, I will describe egoSurf tersely in one sentence: egoSurf helps web publishers to see how they rank in a particular combination of search phrases and web-addresses.
