The last time I looked myself up on Google I was shocked by what was missing--about 2/3 of my stuff was gone. My self-search results remain complete on MSN Live and Yahoo, however.

I have to admit I get a boot out of googling myself, but often it is unproductive as there are one million Gail Whites in the world, some of whom are missionaries in Singapore or CEOs of small companies, etc. (Maybe I should have kept my maiden name). Anyway, I tried Tim's idea of googling "Gail White poem" and found several unsuspected things, including a review of my first book in Dark Horse and a blog that had copied a poem of mine out of First Things, and another blog that had copied a sonnet off the Sphere in order to parody the whole idea of writing sonnets...I definitely recommend this method; you may have become immortal without knowing it.

I posted a poem on another site a few months back, and pasted in Stephen's anti-bot code - not a trace on Google.

It works!

" ...there are one million Gail Whites in the world"

And so far I have found two other "Dr. Mark Allinson"s on the web - both of my doubles in the U.K.

So any crap poems you find on the web are probably theirs.

In addition to Gail's method of googling your name, in quotes, plus "poem", try googling the inverted version of your name, in quotes.

I discovered by that method that a couple of my poems in print have been picked up by indexing services, and that a tech-writing article I wrote decades ago has been included by its copyright owner (IEEE) in two or three different anthologies (money for them, alas, and not for me).

Stephen -- thanks, I'll try it.

Oh my gosh! That parody thing sounds pretty ruthless! Sheesh! I'm enjoying your book, Gail.

Anne

To find anything much of mine, I had to type in the first line, plus my name. Even so, not many published poems came up. I don't really care; I'm a small target, anyway.

The "other" Chris Hanson, it turns out, is an American footballer for the New England Patriots.
About as far from me, in so many ways, as you could get.

What Chris! You don't get paid $20 million to perform 20 days a year? All along I thought you'd just built a resort community and a designer golf course as a getaway in Oz, and I'd been thinking about approaching you for a small loan...

When I googled myself recently I came across the following: http://bonniedee.com/Countess.htm . Scroll down that page to the extract if you want to see me described as "a booby, a nincompoop, a weak-kneed nancy" by my supposed ennobled father (although strangely all in capitals).

My strong suspicion is that said author(?) Bonnie Dee googled herself at some stage and came across my work over 25 years ago on John Dee (1527-1608) and decided I had a good name for a character in - let's call it a book rather than a novel.

After that 'find' for anyone looking for me and/or my work on Dee, there's not much I can say anywhere that's going to bother me if it gets broadcast.