How to UnGoogle Yourself

Posted on September 14, 2007 by C Johnson
Culture, Tech

wikihow.gif Two generations ago—OK, maybe more like ten years ago—the average Joe was still able to enjoy a considerable degree of anonymity simply by not being listed in the telephone book. But then again, ten years ago the average Joe didn’t have a Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo email account. A Twitter, Facebook and MySpace profile. They didn’t post their resumes on line, balance their checkbooks with a click of a button, share their random musings with millions of people all over the world on blogs or fraternize freely with complete strangers on forums.

Today, the average Joe doesn’t need to be listed in the telephone book. Thanks to these wonderfully modern excitements, one’s name, occupation, address, vacation pictures, you name it—it’s all there, neatly tucked away in the endless index files of the mother of all public libraries known as cyberspace.

What’s more, the act of Googling one’s own name can produce surprising, (and depending on how incriminating your night-out-on-the town pictures are) unhappy results. People have been fired from their jobs after being Googled… or not even hired at all.

So for the security conscious (or the just plain paranoid) WikiHow has posted a list of ways to effectively unGoogle yourself. Check out the link for full details, but here’s a rundown of WikiHow’s top six steps towards increased online privacy:

  1. Stop using your full name.
  2. Google yourself to find out what other people are seeing when they search your name.
  3. Make changes to the content that’s already been indexed by Google with your name on it.
  4. Consider using the “robots” HTML meta tag in your content.
  5. E-mail the person responsible for a site… to have the content removed.
  6. Bury content you don’t want by adding new content or moving existing websites higher up in search results.

WikiHow also tips you off to some of the available services that can help clear your name in search results. And don’t forget, there’s always Google’s handy dandy removal request to remove search results or cached content.


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