Slightly off topic.

[tony]

Morning,

I wonder if you can help.

I did a google of my full name and a list of posts to this website was listed.

Now i,m not the most computer literate person, but is there any way of removing this.

When i filled in the registration form i was not aware these details would be on the www.

Any advice.

best regards

tony

 

[biffvernon]

I think not. The googlebots roam the whole of the web. Anything they find may be cached on the vast Google servers. It's not a feature of this website but of the Internet in general. Whenever you post anything anywhere on a public website, it's in the public domain forever.

But it's not so bad. Presumably you posted the message so that other people could read your words of wisdom. Google is, helpfully, just bringing your words to the widest audience.

 

[worms]

Biff, I think Tony's point is that forum posts are coming up on a search of his real name when he only posts under a pseudonym. The web crawlers surely shouldn't be able to access the private information that he used to register with?

 

[biffvernon]

Oh, I see. Hmm, that is strange.

 

[NT]

What search engine robots crawl depends on the content of the site's robots.txt file. As any user of the net knows, almost anything can be and often is linked to almost anything.

It is possible to remove info from the net. If you remove every instance of your name you can, its likely it will fall out of google's caches after a while. If OTOH what you wrote proves popular and gets repeated around the net, it will probably never disapear.


NT

 

[Moo]

I've just googled my name and, apart from a mild frisson of delight that I share it with so many eminent lady academics, I found myself (courtesy of PPUK) on the fourth page.
Not as Moo, but the whole shebang. Which must call into question the point of pseudonyms.

 

[Tom]

I noticed that this was the case with PPUK a few years ago. I make page 1 in Google, together with someone in America with their name spelt the same way as mine. But then, with such an unusual spelling, I wouldn't dream of being able to disappear amongst the crowds!!

Jaqy

 

[biffvernon]

I've just googled my name and, apart from a mild frisson of delight that I share it with so many eminent lady academics, I found myself (courtesy of PPUK) on the fourth page.
Not as Moo, but the whole shebang. Which must call into question the point of pseudonyms.

But did you google for "Moo", which returns several million hits, mostly of a bovine nature, or did you google for "the whole shebang", whose precise spelling is less widely known?

 

[Nemesis]

I seem to share my name with all manner of people...

 

[biffvernon]

You should try putting "Nemesis" into Google Images.

 

[Nemesis]

Roller coaster...

http://www.altontowers.com/themepark/guide_forbiddenvalley.asp

Sadly Cyclone is no more - EH and DCMS made a b*lls up of the listing, EH dragged its heels over the re-application, and the owner (Blackpool Pleasure Beach Ltd) nipped in and bulldozed it.

 

[worms]

I found myself (courtesy of PPUK) on the fourth page.

It depends what variant of my name I input whether I first appear on page 10 of google or as the complete list of 4 pages. However, on none of these does PPUK come up. Checking back on the profile page here, I see nowhere that we are asked to input a real name... So did we ever need to put this in?

 

[BMcD]

When I googled my username it came up with untold sites mainly to do with Biological Macromolecule Crystallization Database but there was this which I quite liked http://www.burnsmcd.com/uglypole/

 

[worms]

http://www.burnsmcd.com/uglypole/

Good one! I did wonder what an uglypole website was going to give us! Now that would be a username!

 

[Moo]

Biff - I put in my proper name, not Moo. So what I'd like to know is how the Google system managed to relate that to my posts on the forum under 'Moo' ??

Not that I'm bothered - I'm far too boring for that sort of lack of security to matter at all. I'm just curious as to how (and why) the connection was made. Do you think it's part of a government requirement that all forums/discussion groups reveal true identities, so that criminals/paedophiles and the like can't hide behind pseudonyms?

 

[Lime]

Re the Ugly Pole Competition, I thought the pole was pretty compared to the wires.

 

[thiambal]

I just did myself (googling that is) and although I come up for a few other things - it does not find any reference to me at PPUK - why are some people found and not others?

 

[skier-hughes]

What information have each of you inputted into your profile?

If the likes of your real name is included in an email address which you supply then this can be found and used.

 

[Manny]

The way in which engines work is by means of bots (robots, automated programmes) that run 24/7 looking at webpages and indexing all the information for you to search through. I assume you've entered your personal data somewhere here in this site?

Not only search engines use these things. Others use similar bots to crawls pages looking for email addresses to send spam to. If you post your personal email address here I guarantee within a few days you'll have forty messages a day trying to sell you all manner of things you don't want. That's why people post: myname at myadress dot com - to hide their address, although I'd put money on the fact that people have invented a way to get your address even posted in that fashion these days...

The people that have posted links here to inappropriate sites are also just automated programmes which search for forums like this, it's just another form of spam.

Basically, just think twice about where you're entering your personal info. Just because your data isn't visible doesn't mean it's not accessible to something indexing the whole site structure. You’ll be amazed what you can find on Google if you know how to use the search tags.

 

[biffvernon]

Basically, just think twice about where you're entering your personal info.

I thought twice - and decided that it's hard to beat the system. So I don't bother to hide anything except my banking passwords and even those could probably be hacked by a determined geek. Result - a relaxed, don't care, peace of mind. I have to delete about three hundred spams per day. Takes two mouse clicks and provides a check avery few minutes that my ISP is working.