Do You Ego Surf?

I used to ego surf a lot more than I do now. There are some very sound writer's 'business practice' reasons to ego surf. Ego surfing is when you type your name into a search engine to see how it (or 'if' it) comes up with results. If you've been writing for any particularly decent period of time it is likely that your name comes up a lot. My name brings up 16 search engine pages dedicated to specific references to it on Google, 18 on MSN and Yahoo. It's wise to check multiple engines and there are plenty more besides the three I listed. Why is it important? Because you can catch misuses, bad references, and even plagerism in some cases that way. Those catches don't happen often, but they do occur. However, probably the best reason is to give your ego a boost--hence the common name for the activity, ego surfing.