Wanted: Better Egosurfing Software
One attractive feature of the internet is the ability to spot conversations I would like to be part of, most obviously posts that mention me, and join them. I can and do use Google for the purpose, doing a search for my name plus one of a group of words likely to show up in references to me, minus a string that signals a post on one of the Usenet groups that I'm already reading, and limiting the search to the period of time since I last did one. It's entertaining, useful--on one occasion I found someone attributing a page or two of text to me that was actually written by someone else--and provides at least a modest boost to my ego, so long as what I find isn't too hostile. And I occasionally use the same approach to try to find new information on some topic of interest to me.
While the available tools are vastly superior to anything I have use of in realspace, they are still pretty clumsy. Google checks to see how recently a page has been updated but doesn't tell me whether the update introduced the particular terms I'm searching for, so many of the pages I find are ones written long ago and seen by me long ago. And my search doesn't distinguish between a page that says something about me and a page that merely contains a link to my blog, a link that is likely to have been there for a long time.
Is there a better way of egosurfing?
One obvious approach is to figure out a better search string; so far I have not managed to do so. Another, if (as I suspect) there are a fair number of people online who engage in similar searches, would be dedicated software for the purpose. The main thing I would want it to do is to filter out any page where the reference to the term being searched for was present during the last such search, while leaving in a page that was spotted before that now contains a new reference.
Suggestions?