Once you have been at the writing process for a while, you'll have collected more words than you remember in detail. From time to time it's helpful to go back to them. Here's a few suggestions for Google search queries that will unearth your old gems.
1. If your name or nickname is sufficiently distinctive, and if you've been using it routinely to sign your work, then you can simply search for your name plus search terms to get what you want. For instance
unearths a sample of writings I've done on the Freedom of Inforamtion Act. Now, as it turns out, this is not a perfect search because I have a cousin Bruce Vielmetti who writes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and will from time to time come up with a related article from him.
2. To reduce your search to a single web site which you've been writing for, search as follows
This will return all of the pages on a single site related to the search terms in question.
3. Most people have forgotted about it, but Google has a special search engine for weblogs, Google Blog Search. If you look for your own stuff here using the similar techniques as above, you'll also find people who have quoted you in their blogs, or even the occasional case of a rogue site that has scraped all of your words and put them on their site.
It's important to be able to retrieve your old words once you have flung them out into the void. You may want to refer back to when you had a really good idea, or there may be something that was published once that was not your best work that you want to find again and repair or remove. Make sure you have some grasp of the powerful tools at hand for remembering what you once knew enough about to write down.
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