My old boss, John Battelle, who among other projects writes SearchBlog, has a tongue-in-cheek method of evaluating new search engines. Discussing beta search site exalead, he checks how it performs on the vanity search, aka your name in quotes. I like this idea (although my wife says this post should be called “it’s all about me”).
Google bores me with the top links in my vanity search almost all connecting to very recent stuff I’ve written in my day job. Microsoft provides slightly more interesting results.
On exalead, I get some cooler stuff complete with thumb-nails of each site, including a funny picture that CNET reporter Declan McCullagh took of me back when I had long hair and, up high, a link to my vanity site, aaronpressman.com. I guess if you’re looking for timely stuff, the mainstreams are the way to go but for more obscure links, check out exalead. Then again, it could be worse — my name could be John Smith.
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