- Google has a feature that alerts you when your personal information gets posted online.
- You can pair that feature with the “Remove your result” tool to make it difficult for people to find that online.
- This doesn’t erase the information off the internet, but it does make it so that it does not appear when your name is searched in Google.
If you Google your name, address or phone number, you might be surprised by the number of results you see with your personal information. There’s a hidden feature in Google that will alert you when it finds these results, though, allowing you to remove them.
Google has about 83% of the search market, according to Statista, and is far ahead of competitors such as Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo. That means, if folks are looking for your information, chances are they’ll try Google first.
This approach is different than just asking Google to remove private results. Instead, this feature proactively searches for your phone number, email and home address and will alert you when it finds something. Then, you can just tell Google to delete it from search results.
Note: Google doesn’t remove your information from the internet, but it scrubs it from Google Search and makes it harder for people to find.
Here’s how to do it.