New Web Site Helps You Track Your Reputation

This could be a swell way to begin a day, of course, getting an email letting you know someone thinks the world would be better off without you, but if your reputation is important to you, it's probably necessary to have an idea of what's being said about you. And at least you no longer have to toil and look for dreck but can have it come to you.

I spoke to Dirtch's creator, Ping Liang, owner of Irvine, California-based Wizag. Before Wizag, he owned a business, TransDimension, that created USB technology to connect digital cameras to printers. He is also a professor at the University of California in Riverside. He does research and teaches about video streaming and processing, signal processing and VLSI architecture. In other words, this is no dummy.

Anyway, I was hoping Liang would have some great reason for starting Dirtch -- like maybe someone called him some mean name a few years ago on a blog, or maybe he was repeatedly called four-eyes in the fifth grade due to the binocular-sized spectacles he wore on the tip of his nose (oh, wait, that was me). But alas, no. He was simply taking the search engine concept that Google and Bing have pretty much conquered and narrowcasting it, just as he had already done with a site called QuestforCures.com, a search engine designed to help people find cures and treatments for diseases.

Liang is quick to say that while he comes up with the ideas for his business, he has a team of 10 developers that do most of the heavy lifting. And there's a lot of heavy lifting. "We spent a whole year writing the semantics analysis program," he says. "You really have to do thousands of semantic analyses to kick out the things that are relevant."

I pretended to understand that, as he continued, trying to explain the process of putting this software together: "There are 25,000 different negative expressions that can be associated with people. We're currently doing a fraction of those, though we eventually will have a full version where we search for all those different expressions."

Expressions, says Liang, like "charged with a crime," "driving under the influence," "jerk" and "moron."

So, yes, if someone calls you a jerk or suggests you should be charged with a crime for having the temerity to run such a lousy company, Dirtch will likely turn that up.

Right now, the service is set up to find dirt on individuals, but the Dirtch team is working to make it find negative comments and information on businesses and products. Eventually, he envisions Dirtch as a paid service, but right now, it's a completely free service for anyone to use. So, sure, anyone, go ahead, sign up if you want, and see if anyone's hurling insults at you. It'll be fun.

Actually, it might be fun, in that there may not be as many insults out there as you might think. "You'd be surprised," says Liang. "Most people come up clean."