Jason wrote a me a little note on this topic not too long ago, but just in the past week I've been hit twice by well-meaning individuals who I am flattered have gotten some use out of the information on my blog but have neglected to use quotation or post a link back to my blog and the original post(s). Here is the latest example from an ERE group:

...pulled from ERE group SOURCING Tools and Methodologies:(http://www.ere.net/erenetwork/groups/posting.asp?LISTINGID={48D7117...} )

"Hi All, Which Passive Search Tools, Methods, Ideas etc would you recommend and why??
Regards,
Himanshu Jain"

response from Kevin Watson:

"By definition, an X-ray search (also known as a site: search) is the process of exploring a company’s servers and/or website or domain. X-raying occurs when you conduct a search across a web site's domain or server.
Depending on what search engine you use, you will use different ‘operators’ to conduct an x-ray search:

Google - site:
Live (MSN) - domain: or site:
Yahoo - domain: or site:

To create an x-ray search string, simply choose one of the operators depending on what search engine you are working on, add your domain after the colon (:), and then add your search terms. For example, if you wanted to search MySpace for a .NET developer, this is what your search string might look like:

site:myspace.com “.NET” developer -inurl:classifieds

Adding the -inurl:classifieds will eliminate the job posting pages that MySpace has available, and will only give you the MySpace profile pages of people who have the terms .NET and developer on them. By the way, you do not need to have a MySpace account in order to run a search like this.
Here’s another example, using LinkedIn:

site:linkedin.com “project manager” construction -inurl:find

In this case, I noticed when I ran the search without -inurl:find, I was getting a lot of pages with directory results (just a list of names and not individual profiles) so I examined the similarities in those particular “noise” pages and added in the -inurl:find to eliminate them and bring up mostly just profiles.

Please feel free to copy these examples and paste them into your search engines to test them out. This is one of the passive searching techniques I use on a daily basis."

Compare what Kevin "wrote" to my blog post on May 16th: http://spiresearch.blogspot.com/2007/05/simple-x-ray-searching.html

Thankfully, someone else noticed that and wrote a response. I would have been okay with this, except that Kevin copied almost the ENTIRE post verbatim, omitting only the first paragraph from my original post. That give the wrong impression of his researching methods, and nowhere is there a link back to my original blog listed or my name given credit.

Jason, thanks for writing the original note to me. I hadn't really been paying attention much to this, but it would seem a pretty important thing to watch for!