While many of us have taken advantage of Facebook and MySpace to catch up catch up with old school friends and work colleagues, a recent survey has revealed that we also have an unfortunate habit of sniffing around our exes to see what they’ve been up to since the breakup, as well as indulging in our own personal ego trips by Googling ourselves.

In fact, according to the survey recently conducted by people search site Yasni, 97 percent of us have attempted to massage our egos by searching for our own names using a search engine. The survey involved talking to over 1,700 members of the British public, and it also revealed some disturbing habits when it comes to stalking ex-partners and former adversaries online.

Over half of the respondents (54 percent) admitted that they’d searched for an ex partner online, and a quarter of those said they’d done it more than once. Apparently, 21 percent of those looking for their former flames cited jealousy as the reason, while nine percent chose the simple ‘because I knew I wouldn’t be caught’ answer. Meanwhile, 57 percent said that they were looking merely out of curiosity.

On average, women were slightly more likely to search for ex partners online than men. Similarly, 46 percent of the respondents in the survey admitted to searching for someone that they claimed to dislike. Celebrities also proved to be paricularly popular, with 93 percent of the respondents admitting to searching for a famous individual on a social networking site or search engine.

Commenting on the findings, Yasni’s CEO Steffen Ruehl said that ‘curiosity is an interesting thing; it is human nature to investigate. It can make people search for people they may dislike, or people they have had personal relationships with in the past. The fact that so many Brits use the internet and services like ours to provide them with undetectable access to other people’s lives is a fact of today’s online society.’ Ruehl also pointed out that you can help to stop potential stalkers by setting your social networking profiles to private.

Although you can never solely rely on surveys and statistics to represent the habits of a nation, it’s interesting to see that so many of us admit to stalking exes and people we don’t like online. How often do you Google yourself, and have you ever looked for an ex online to see what they’re up to? Feel free to share your cyber stalking habits in the forums.