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I thought the method was to change your name to something extremely common, like "Janet Brown." A variant is to take the name of some celebrity, so that all the search results are for him or her.
I think this could be a bad idea for some prople, and here’s why. I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her. She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her…
Only if your worst fear is bad PR.
If there is some sophisticated enemy who might want to attack you, then the fact that the embarrassing video is the 4834th Google result doesn't protect you from anything, it means there's at least 4834 results for you, all of which contain potentially dangerous information, instead of one.
> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…
This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search.
But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal.
And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate property. Alphabet won't change unless it's made to do so.
How long does it take to actually remove your page from Google's search index? I just searched for the author's name and his site still shows up as the top result.
> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…
> This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. The average person isn’t going to google an individual to find their blogs or whatever. The first stop is figuring out their social media destinations. You would hardly expect to find really anything about a person on Google that isn’t a…
It's a fine idea. But what I'm taking away from this post is the link to the Google/Chromium web DRM prototype and summary ... yikes. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environ... >- The web page executing in a user's web browser >- A third party that can “attest” to the device a web browser is executing on, referred to as the attester >- The web developers server which can remotely verify attestati…
Google would do anything to make it harder for others to crawl the web. Killing RSS was part of that strategy. News sites will implement these DRMs, but of course they will still allow Google because it is their source of traffic. Alternative search engines and good bots will be locked out.
Oh please.
I get that it's more satisfying to blame Google than the faceless masses who had zero interest in RSS and who had a variety of alternatives to Reader in any case.
I guess they also had a strategy to kill social media by axing Google+ and user-created encyclopedias by killing Knol.
I think this could be a bad idea for some prople, and here’s why. I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her. She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her…
I had a classmate in pre-Web days who lived in NYC and shared a name with someone who was widely hated in many NYC circles (don't remember the details). Anyway, my classmate got literal death threats by phone.
I think this could be a bad idea for some prople, and here’s why. I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her. She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her…
For a while, I actively tried to remove my google results, but there are still archive and social media sites that have my info up, despite my best attempts to take it down. There are also people’s personal sites that have my info, but I don’t want to contact them, because I doubt that these people would believe that this is a case of mistaken identity, and I don’t want to draw attention to myself all over again. I have family who had a similar thing happen, and they counseled me not to take legal action, since it would probably lead my harassers to double down.
So now I am trying to rebuild my actual, positive online presence, except for contact information, because I still fear for my physical safety all these years later. It is a delicate balance. The political situation here (US) is so unstable, the memory of the internet is so long, and developing technology (generative AI) is making it so that there might be a point in the future where a sufficiently motivated individual could exact political retribution on a whole set of perceived enemies at once. This would make my entire life a hellish experience (or end it), no matter the fact that I wasn’t an extremist. I feel that this makes my online presence as essential to my well-being as things like exercise, investing for retirement, etc.
Clickbait.