The psychology behind it is essentially the same behind looking for your name in the White Pages, within the credits of a production you were involved in, or on a document you wrote. Ego-searching specifically involves plugging your name into Google, usually your full name in quotes, and hunting down matches that are relevant to yourself personally.
At the office, we released (today) the Google Mini to the rest of the company as our intranet search tool. Within an hour, we had already processed on average 2 queries per employee. Within a sales-orientated company, you might imagine the top queries would be for part numbers, or for product details; Our top 10 queries were employee names. After discussing it with people, we've found most of these were ego-searches, and searches on immediate colleagues.
It seems natural to me that people to want to seek recognition of their work, of their relevance within society, and of their existence! People often feel like they are worthless if they have not contributed something to the world that is publicly noticeable. I believe this is the cause of the rise in short-term blogging, and subsequently the perceived decline of blogging in general.
Unfortunately searching for yourself on the Internet is something that can only pull back a limited type of information. I've heard stories of people fighting for their name's ranking on Google. More often than not, this happens with people within the IT industry "competing" with politicians, media celebrities, and even astronauts. At the risk of sounding like a character from The Matrix: The Internet cannot tell you who you are.
The Internet does, however, provide an entirely relentless archive of public activities, especially those pertaining to active users of the Internet itself. For example, if I search carefully enough, I can trace my movements back to messages posted on Usenet in 1991. The personal embarrassment of reading messages from myself at age 10 is enough to stop me from publishing links; since I know they're buried enough that anyone willing to search so vigorously is probably worthy of reading them.
Ultimately, with very common English name, my own ego-search is difficult. It has lead me to discover interesting namesakes, though. The most prominent of which is Simon Butcher, a photographer in London. Second on the list is the Simon Butcher who appears to be a techie in the TV industry, again in the UK (been there, done that).
My own name only really appears in the forum of postings about the Linux Kernel, C++ programming using GCC, and Unicode, my past involvement with the IANA, the IETF, MRTG, and ELKS: Ultimate, this is all stuff I was involved in years ago, and completely irrelevant to who I am today.
Go ahead, see what turns up for your name:
