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What Does This Mean?

Ego Surfing

Brainrot Score: 4.5 ⓘOBSERVED
[ SLANG ][ ENGLISH DAILY ][ OLD WEB ]

Searching the internet for your own name or pseudonym to see what appears. People do it out of curiosity, to manage their reputation or to check what others can find; the habit is also called vanity searching or googling yourself.

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE

""After the interview aired, he spent an hour ego surfing to see what people said.""

LORE & ORIGIN

Wikipedia's Egosurfing article says Sean Carton is credited with introducing the term in 1995 and that it first appeared in print in Gareth Branwyn's March 1995 Jargon Watch column in Wired. It adds that searching Usenet for your own name was earlier called "kibozing" after James "Kibo" Parry, and cites a Pew finding that 47% of American adult internet users had run a vanity search. Other names are egosearching, egogoogling and self-googling.

FIRST SEEN
1995 (credited to Sean Carton; first in print in Wired's Jargon Watch, March 1995)
PEAK ERA (EDITORIAL)
1995-2010s (search engines, vanity searches)
CURRENT STATUS
Legacy / Decaying Slang

EQUIVALENT CONCEPTS IN OTHER LANGUAGES

TREND STATUS
↓ FADING
EDITORIAL ESTIMATE
CULTURE CATEGORY
[ SLANG ][ ENGLISH DAILY ][ OLD WEB ]
RELATED TERMS

MENTIONS OVER TIME

DOCUMENTED SINCE
1995 (credited to Sean Carton; first in print in Wired's Jargon Watch, March 1995)
NOW

Radar observation data not yet available for this term.

RELATED SEARCHES

TOP PLATFORMS

Not enough Radar data yet to show a platform breakdown.

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