Google yourself regularly
It’s not just for fun any more. The truth (and more) is out there.
I do get such a charge out of seeing the Google searches that send people to me. (The top so far are A) Victorian hand-tooled tin tinsel and B) World Famous Love Acts. The Love Acts I can understand, it’s the tinsel afficianados who worry me.)


So once all this information about you is out there in Googleland, is there anything you can do about it? Like so much in life, that depends on who you are. Google indexes more than 3 billion Web pages, 400 million images, and 800 million newsgroup postings (including an archive of embryonic Internet chatter it purchased from an outfit called Deja.com), but it is willing to remove certain information, under certain circumstances.

If you desperately want that picture of a bleary-eyed you in an ill-fitting toga to disappear from Google, and the search engine found the photo on a Web site you control, then all you have to do is take the picture down. But in the more likely event that Google found the offending information on someone else's Web site, you are on your own. Google will not remove information from its index unless the Webmaster in question requests it. So say you flee an abusive relationship, move to a new state, and decide to run in a 10K road race, only to realize later that your home address got posted next to your time on the running club's Web site. If you want that information removed, you have to appeal to the good graces of the running club Webmaster, not Google.