One of the things I like about the Internet is the ability to spot people talking about me and, if necessary, respond. In the old days of Usenet, I could do it using the DejaNews search engine. I used to describe the situation as the winds of the world blowing any mention of me to my ears and blowing my response back to the ears of everyone who heard the mention—in the form of a post by me on the same thread of the same newsgroup.
Unfortunately, the DejaNews archive was taken over by Google, which proceeded to make its Usenet search engine year by year less workable. At this point, so far as I can tell, the Google Groups engine is almost entirely useless for searching Usenet. That would be a serious problem if Usenet still contained the bulk of the relevant conversations, but it doesn't. What I most want to search now is the web.
Google Internet search engine lets me do that. I can filter out most references to other David Friedmans—it is, unfortunately, a pretty common name—by including in my search string an appropriate collection of ors (Economist OR Libertarian OR Anarchist OR ...) and nots (-Basketball -Concerned -Ironic - ...) . But I am left with hits most of which are to pages with links to my blog, my web page, or YouTube videos of talks I have given. While I am happy to know that people are linking to my material, none of those is a conversation or requires a response.
What I want is some way of doing a search that will ignore my name in links and report only pages where someone is actually saying something about me. Any suggestions from those more expert in the relevant technology than I am?
(And yes, for any Usenet veterans out there, I know that the proper term is kibozing.)
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