If you are a professional freelance writer long enough, you’ll eventually write so many things, for so many places and people, that it can be tricky to find former writings when the need arises. Like many types of freelance writing research, a good, advanced Google search can be a good place to start.
How To Search For Your Previously Published Writings
As a writer, you should be writing both for yourself, and for paying clients. If you are looking for something you wrote previously for one of your web properties, finding it can be really easy, if you remember WHERE you published it, or really tricky, if you cannot.
For published articles that you remember where they went, it is as simple as typing the topic into a Google search along with the site operator. The site operator restricts a search to a specific site. This is also useful for other research when you want your answers to come from a specific place. For example, when researching tax regulations, adding site:irs.gov is a way to ensure that your answers come straight from the horse’s mouth.
ebates reviews site:financegourmet.com
The above search will find articles related to ebates reviews from my freelance financial writing website Finance Gourmet.
Custom Google Search to Find Writings
If you can’t remember where you published your previous bits of genius, but you know it was on one of your web properties, a custom Google search is a valuable tool.
Google custom searches are easy to create.
- Go to cse.google.com — CSE stands for Custom Search Engine, if that helps you remember.
- Click New search engine
- Enter the names of your websites where you publish your own articles. As you enter sites, new fields appear, so you can enter literally dozens, or even hundreds of websites to search.
- Click Create
- Click Public URL
- Bookmark your new search engine
If you bookmark the URL you get, then you can easily return to the custom search whenever you need it. You could also create a webpage, OneNote page, or other resource with the links. If you’d rather, you can just keep going back to cse.google.com where you’ll find a list of all the custom searches you have created (at least the ones you created when you were logged in.)
You can actually create as many custom search engines as you like. For example, I have custom searches for financial advice that I write, as well as some for parenting advice, and for the freelance technology writing I do. Of course, I also have an “overall search” that searches pretty much every one of my websites for those times when I wrote something, and just can’t remember where I put it… like something about painting my house, for example.
Make sure you give your carefully crafted custom searches useful names so that you know what they do when you come back later.
Finding Your Writings On Someone Else’s Site
When it comes to finding things you have previously written for someone else, there are multiple options, depending upon how you wrote, and how they published what you wrote.
Ideally, what you wrote was so well written, well received, and well linked, that it just shows up in a regular Google search.
However, if it has been a while, you might not remember the exact keywords you used, or maybe it just never found a ranking, or whatever. In that case, it depends on whether or not you get a byline when you write.
Many websites include an author page if you do get a byline. That makes finding your work much easier. Just search for your author page.
brian nelson site:someonewhopaysme.com
This should bring up a list of my writings on that website
If there is no author page, the above search will still bring up your articles, so long as your name appears on the page somewhere.
If you didn’t get a byline, or your name isn’t on what was published for whatever reason, it’s time to hunt back through your archives, or emails, or other records you have. What you are looking for is an exact wording that you can search that is longer than just three or four words.
For example, if you search for “If you somehow end up on either KreditKarma or CreditCarma chances are you are in for a scam,” which is the exact wording from a Word document that I used to write up that very article before publishing it, chances are very good you are going to find my article. (In some cases, you’ll also find articles that were plagiarized from yours, which is oh so fun.)
As a last resort, check your drafts folder, or wherever you keep works with no home. I can’t count how many times I was SURE I published something only to find it in my in progress, or to market, folder rather than published out there on the internet somewhere.
Good luck hunting, and when you find those articles be sure to link to them. That just might make them a little easier to find in the future.