Curious to find out if someone is looking for you online? Here are some web tools that allow you to find out how, when and how many times your name is searched
With the widespread diffusion of social networks and, even before that, with an immense amount of Web pages where you talk about anything (but also about any person), it is increasingly likely that someone "is looking for you". Whether out of curiosity, for work or for more or less noble and legal purposes, people have always been looking for each other and trying to get information about a friend/enemy.
While once it was much more difficult (and expensive) to do it, today it is almost within everyone's reach and certainly very often it is free. How to know, today, who is trying to gather information about you? It's not always possible to do it, but it's almost always possible to know who is talking about you and, consequently, what information a third party might be gathering about you to find you more easily.
LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn, the social network dedicated to the world of work, is a very powerful tool for researching people. If you've opened a profile on Linkedin, it will also be searchable through Google and for you, in most cases, that will be good: more contacts, more job opportunities. If you have chosen to pay for the paid version of Linkedin, you will also be able to see who has viewed your profile. This feature is severely limited in the free version of the social.
Google Alerts
You can't know who is searching for your first and last name on Google. But it is possible to know if your first and last name appear on any web page. To know this, you need to use Google Alerts, that is the free service of Google that tells you in which pages a string of text appears. String that can also be your name. If you are the engineer Mario Rossi, therefore, you could set an alert for "Mario Rossi" and another for "Ingegnere Rossi". That way, whenever a page containing those words is published, you'll be alerted.
Social Mentions
The biggest limitation of Google Alerts, and Google in general, is that it can't access content published on Facebook. Other services, however, can. For example, Mention.com, a site through which (upon free sign-up) you can scan Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to see who's talking about you.
Family Search
There's also a whole parallel world of searches based on kinship. Some foreign sites, like www.adopteeconnect.com and www.ancestry.com allow to search a person and many of his relatives. In Italy there is the portal Antenati, created by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism or private sites like Geneanet.org that, however, are much less powerful and much more limited.
Council records and registers
Another way in which a fine and experienced searcher of people online could find you is to browse through the death records filed in the municipality and, sometimes, also published on the online sites of the Local Administrations. Let's say an ex-partner is looking for you and remembers your parents' name, surname and age. If they are very old, this person could look for them among the dead people and, unfortunately, find them. Then he would know where they died and could deduce the area where they resided. This would be a first step in finding you or other close relatives of the deceased.