Pronet Advertising lists ten things that you should be monitoring on the Internet.  The list includes: 

• Company name
• Company URL
• Public facing figures
• Product names
• Product URLs
• The industry "hang outs"
• Employee activity/blogs
• Conversations
• Brand image
• Competitors

How do you monitor?  Pronet Advertising has some good suggestions for specific sources of information.  In addition, you can check out websites such as the Resource Shelf that direct you to more specialized resources.  Resource Shelf has an informative newsletter and the website is updated daily to add “high-quality web-based resources, including databases, lists and rankings, real-time sources, and multimedia.”    

In most situations, however, I think that periodic searches on a couple of search engines will meet most of your monitoring needs.  Just plug in the name of your client or your law firm or your client’s product or the name of opposing counsel or your own name and see what you find.   I use Google as my primary search engine, perhaps just because I have become so comfortable with its search functions.   All search engines operate differently, so we should all become familiar with several.

Paula Hane at Information Today has a good article discussing the search functions of Ask.com.  
In addition to some sample searches, she points out that Ask.com has a special help session that features librarian Gary Price.  Gary is the editor of Resource Shelf, mentioned above as a great resource for finding information.   

Try a few searches on ask.com to see what you think, and then do the same searches on Google for comparison.