Search engines collect information from billions of pages out on the
internet. Among these there might be pages that carry information about
you – your email, your job, your interests, and even personally
identifiable information such as your name, your phone number and your
address. A surprisingly large number of people share a disturbingly
detailed account of their lives with no one in particular on Facebook,
Twitter, Foursquare and dozens of specialized social networking sites.
Social networking sites usually offer certain degree of privacy but
other sites such as forums and blogs are viewable by anybody and can
appear in search results.
People have the tendency to reuse usernames when registering on
different websites. It is very easy to build up a profile on such a
person by searching their username on Google, and following every result
the username shows up on. By picking up breadcrumbs, reading remarks
and comments left behind on discussion boards anybody can get a fair
idea of the person’s interests, where he lives and what he does.
If something compromising about you is on the Internet, first try to
remove it from the site where it’s appearing. This means that you need
to contact the webmaster of the page and ask them to take down the
content in question. Remember that Google only indexes information that
is already available on the Internet. If the content isn’t removed from
the original site, people will be able to see it even if it doesn’t
appear in Google’s search results.
To contact a webmaster, find a ‘Contact us’ link or an email address
for the webmaster on the website itself. If you can’t find a contact
address, look up a site’s webmaster information using a special search
called a ‘Whois’ search. You can perform a Whois search using Google:
just search for “whois www.example.com”. Read
how to find who owns a website for details.
Once the content is no longer available, go to
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
and click on “Create a new removal request” and enter the URL of the
page you want to remove from Google search. The URL is
case-sensitive—use exactly the same characters and capitalization that
the site uses.
There can be two scenarios:
- The page is removed from the site and now returns error code 404, i.e. Page Not Found.
- The page in question still exists but has been updated to remove information about you.
The webmaster tool automatically detects if the page returns error 404 and will ask you to confirm your request.
If the page still exist, you have to tell Google how the page has
changed. For this, Google will ask you to type a word that no longer
appears on the live page, but is still in the cached version. For
example if the Google cache of the page contains your name which has
been removed from the live page, type your name as it appears in the
cached version but doesn’t appear on the updated page. Don’t tell Google
that “my name has been removed’. Google suggests users to type a single
word rather than a phrase as it often more effective.
Confirm the request and then Click Remove Cache. Once your request
has been processed and Google confirms that the submitted word no longer
appear on the page, the search result will no longer show a snippet,
nor will the cached page be available. There is no estimated time frame
when this would happen. It can happen as quickly as the next day or take
weeks to update.
Before you request removal of your content from Google, you should
make sure that the problematic content has been removed from the web.
Otherwise, even if your request is successful, the information could
reappear in Google’s index after 90 days.
Go to the website www.fliptext.org.
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (
/ˈdoʊnəl ˈweɪlz/; born August 7, 1966[3]) is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company.[4][5] Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, United States, where he attended Randolph School,
a university-preparatory school, then earned bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in finance. While in graduate school, he taught at two
universities, but left before completing a PhD in order to take a job in
finance and later worked as the research director of a Chicago futures
and options firm. In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis,
a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content.
The company would provide the initial funding for the peer-reviewed free
encyclopedia Nupedia (2000–2003) and its successor, Wikipedia.
