Written by wired wiki

The mighty search engine has allowed us to do so many things. “Mighty” is the operative word, as these same search engines (usually the one that starts with a “G” and ends with an “oogle”) can also curse us all. If you think about it, any schmuck can find out more about you than you’d like by typing only your first and last name.

Different folks certainly have different tolerance levels for their online persona and how public they want it to be, but thankfully, there are tips to ensure that your boss, your ex, or your mildly interested former friends can keep tabs on you on your terms.

Unfortunately, pleas to remove content on Google fall on deaf, mechanical Google ears. The best and easiest way to remove content from Google (and other search engines in the process) is to remove the content from the internet. This guide will show you how to make the best of the content that is there or how to remove it entirely.

Google Yourself

Do yourself a favor and Google yourself every now and then. Search websites, search images (Google Images and Yahoo Images both allow you to do this), search video; all of it. Carefully comb the rest of the website on which you find yourself linked, too. Trust us, a completely innocuous photo of you at a backyard barbeque can easily end up in the same, shameful, public album as your friends trying to give the cat a contact high at the same event.

Some tips: You’ll want to put your first and last name in quotes. That way, Google will show you the pages where your first and last name are together and filter out lists of pages that just happen to contain both your first and last name somewhere on the page.

Take inventory of your search results. How would this look like to your next employer? Scary?

The Entourage

Many of the scariest websites are most often from people you know. For example, members of wedding parties will often find themselves on a wedding website. Lucky for you, if you’re on a wedding website, you’re probably friends with the person who owns and hosts the content on the internet. A simple e-mail should straighten up any wayward information.

Picasaweb, Flickr and other image searches

Though wedding websites are usually safe, public photo albums are probably not. It’s therefore a good idea to politely request removal of your last name from friends’ public photo albums. Think of how embarrassing it would be to find your full moniker attached to a caption reading “butt contestant,” no matter how tame or innocent the context.

On Flickr and Picasaweb, if you find yourself tagged in a photo that you really don’t want people to associate to your name, you’ll want to un-tag yourself. Under the picture where you are tagged it says “Remove tag.” Click the link and it won’t show up in the photos section of your profile. It will still be in your friend’s album and other people can still see it, but your name won’t appear when passerby’s mouse over it.

SmugMug is often a professional, password-only site. Perhaps recommend this site to the friends who have sensitive photos of you.

Facebook and LinkedIn

Though you should already have a private Facebook account in the interest of, well, taming your Googlability, here’s how to hide yourself, anyway.

1. Log into your account. Hover your cursor over the Settings tab, and click on Privacy Settings.
2. Click Profile to control who can see what on your profile. Just about everything should have “Only Friends.” Ditto for Contact Information (which is the second tab under Profile).
3. Fiddling with the Search is also a good idea. Web searches will tell others looking for your name if you are indeed on Facebook, though you can fix it so people can only see your name, profile pic, and a link to add you as a friend. Or, you can go into mega-stealth mode and make it so just about anyone will never find you. It’s highly customizable, depending on what you want people to see. And trust us, they are looking.

Ditto with LinkedIn. Anyone googling your name will likely come up on your LinkedIn profile first, and despite it being a repository for your more grown-up pursuits, it’s probably still unsettling to have random Google searchers ask you about things on it if you weren’t expecting it.

Adding Robots.txt to your web host

Google and other search engines will be stopped cold in their tracks if they see a dreaded little text file on a web server. The text file is named ‘robots.txt’ and it needs to contain the following text:

User-agent: *  Disallow: /

You can create the text file in any plain text editor. If you want to host the embarrassing websites, but don’t want Google (or any other search engine) to see it, add the file to your web host in its top-level folder.

In the Future

As your online and real lives merge even further in the so-called digital age, it’s going to be an uphill battle to remove the content that’s out there. Bad news for those with little common sense.

However, the best way to avoid compromising situations online is to avoid compromising situations in real life. We’re not saying not to have any fun, but until you are able to keep people from taking digital photos of you, you’re stuck behaving properly in public. Look on the bright side, your online self is keeping you honest, right?

Bonus: Ture?

Written by Kevin Purdy

Whether your important data lives in the cloud, on your laptop, or on a different operating system, you shouldn’t have to use sub-par tools to get at it. These downloads work with every major operating system, along with some not-so-major (mobile) ones.

Photo by Mykl Roventine.

All of these applications run on all three major operating systems—Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux—and most can be loaded onto a thumb drive and run as a portable app on any Windows system. Some can also be accessed from the web, and a few have dedicated mobile apps for most phone platforms. We’ve distinguished which apps work where at the front of each item. If we’ve missed any platforms, please tell us so (politely!) in the comments.

10. Buddi

Computers: Buddi is a financial management application developed with financial non-experts in mind. Sure, it can import your CSV file from a bank or financial firm, and it does all the standard financial calculations and projections. But the way it switches between money figures, and walks you through the importing and setting up of your accounts, makes it a real open-source find, and you can easily swap profiles between your laptop and desktop systems, if needed. Looking for something with a bit more mathematical oomph? Money management alternative GnuCash has you covered.

9. KeePass

Computers, portable, cellphones: You use a multitude of applications and web sites that require passwords, license keys, and administrator codes. On one computer alone, that makes it worth having a central vault for all that stuff. If you use more than one computer, having a consistent KeePass database is really, really helpful. Encrypt your master password database with a file only you have access to, and/or a truly secure single password, and you can take that list just about anywhere—on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhones, Android, BlackBerry, Palms, on a USB drive, or pretty much anywhere. Open-source coders love to write KeePass apps, so there’s a very good chance you’ll always have this clever password management system at your side. For help getting started with KeePass, check out Gina’s guide to securely tracking passwords. (It also works great in conjunction with Dropbox.

8. TrueCrypt

Computers: TrueCrypt is a multi-platform security tool for encrypting and protecting files, folders, or entire drives. The software behind it is open source, and so likely to be supported and developed beyond its current version and platforms. It’s only on Windows, Mac, and Linux at the moment (though that’s no small feat), but it can be made to run as a portable app, and its encryption standards—AES, Serpent, and Twofish—are supported by many other encryption apps that can work with it. In other words, TrueCrypt makes you feel better about taking all the revealing information about yourself or your work on the road. Check our guide to encrypting your data for more.

7. Thunderbird

Computers, portable: Mozilla’s desktop email client is an excellent tool for reading, sending, and archiving email, even if it doesn’t get a ton of love these days—seeing as how seemingly everyone’s doing their email thing on the web. But even if you don’t use it as your main email client, Thunderbird remains the most reliable way to back up your email from any service and, in most cases, still access it when the web interface goes down. With the imminent release of Thunderbird 3, and the portable version to follow right after, Thunderbird might just turn a few more folks back to the idea of desktop email.

6. Pidgin and Adium

Computers, portable: They’re not the same program, but they come from the same open-source roots. These instant messaging clients do the yeoman’s work of connecting to all the major chat protocols and helping you maintain a universal buddy list. Pidgin does the job adequately, if without a ton of pizazz, on Windows and Linux clients (you can spice it up a bit with these snazzy plug-ins), while Adium, compiled from the same libpurple code library, is written with OS X’s glassy looks in mind. Both are crucial if you don’t want to run multiple memory-sucking IM clients on all your machines.

5. Miro

Computers, portable: Miro doesn’t get enough love (here or elsewhere) for being a pretty great all-in-one aggregator for all the video on the web. The open-source video player handles video podcast feeds, Hulu streams (which you can subscribe to, show-by-show, TiVo-style), live streams, local files, and anything else with moving pictures with ease and grace, and you can take it wherever you go to ensure you can watch your favorite web-accessible or desktop videos.

4. 7-Zip

Computers, portable: 7-Zip doesn’t have the sexiest job on a computer, but since no two operating systems accept all the same compressed file formats, it’s an essential download. It tackles the RAR files that file sharers are so fond of, makes sense of .tar and .gz files on Windows systems, and has its own compression format (.7z) that’s space-saving and quick.

3. Firefox

Computer, portable, and (coming soon on non-Maemo devices) mobile: Even if you don’t think it’s the absolute fastest or most cutting-edge browser, Firefox is safer than the well-known standard on most Windows systems, and it’s customizable in every last detail. That makes it worth keeping on your USB drive as a go-to option for browsing at the in-laws or at home. With add-ons like Xmarks or Weave, it’s also easy to keep your bookmarks—and keyword bookmark searches—within reach on any system. And when Firefox Mobile, a.k.a. Fennec, makes its debut on mobile phones, we might see some rather awesome synchronization of everything, right down to the last tab you had open at home.

2. Dropbox

Computers, web, mobile: Dropbox creates a single folder that you’ll always be able to access, no matter where you are. That folder can actually sync files and folders from anywhere on your system, but the concept remains the same—instant backup for anything you drop in one location, across multiple computers, through Dropbox’s web site, on the iPhone, and on mobile browsers. That makes it perfect for music you love to listen to, documents you need to work on, and photos you pick up at a relative’s house. In other words, feel free to stop emailing yourself.

1. VLC Media Player

Computer, portable: Managing the multitude of codecs, formats, and restrictions on media files, from one system to another, is a pain you don’t need. VLC Media player, installed on any system, just works. It’s built with the goods to process, convert, resize, and stream just about any file you can find with audio or video, and its presence on a USB drive ensures nobody ever comes up embarrassed when their nephew’s soccer video just won’t play, even though, they swear, it worked just yesterday. For a guide on making the most of VLC’s cross-codec powers, read Adam’s tips on mastering your digital media with VLC.