Google will tell you when your address shows up in its search results

Google your own name sometime. Not for vanity. Search it the way somebody trying to find you would, with your town added, and see what comes back. Do it in an incognito or private window, so you are not looking at results shaped by your own account and your own search history.

For most of us it's a page of those people-finder sites. They sometimes list your age, the street you live on, the names of your relatives and a phone number that may or may not still work. None of it is secret, exactly. It's just been collected and stacked up in one place where anybody can read it.

Google has a tool that watches for that on your behalf. It's called "Results about you," it's free, and you set it up once. Google says more than 10 million people have used it.

The tool doesn't scrub the internet. It watches Google's own search results for details you tell it to look for, tells you when it finds them, and gives you a button to ask for the result to be taken out of Search. Watching is one thing, but it's blurrier when you request removal.

Setting it up

1. Go to goo.gle/resultsaboutyou, or open the Google app, tap your profile picture, and choose "Results about you." The hub also lives at myactivity.google.com/results-about-you.
2. Add what you want watched. Google takes your name plus a nickname or a maiden name, and it takes more than one of each contact detail. So put in every phone number, home address, and email address you have used.
3. Add your government ID numbers too. Since February, Google also monitors for a driver's license, a passport, or a Social Security number showing up in Search.
4. Turn notifications on. Google says matches show up within a few hours of setup, and after that it emails you or pings the Google app when something new appears.

Then you wait, and the results come to you. When one arrives you open it, look at what the page is actually showing, and hit "Request to remove" on the ones you want gone. Google reviews each request against its policy and emails you what it decided.

You can also start a request straight from a search result. Tap the three dots next to it, open "About this result," and choose "Remove result."

What it will actually take down

Google's removal policy is broader than most people expect. Home address, phone number, and email address are the obvious ones. It also covers government ID numbers, bank and credit card numbers, pictures of your signature or your ID, medical records, and login credentials.

A removal comes in two strengths. Google can pull the result out of every search, or it can pull it only out of searches for your name, which leaves the page findable by other means. Google says the first one is what happens most of the time. The narrower one turns up when the page also carries something Google considers valuable to the public, or somebody else's details sitting alongside yours. It is still useful. Nobody is typing your bank account number into Google. They are typing your name.

What it can't touch

Google says it plainly on its own announcement page. "Removing this information from Google Search doesn't remove it from the web entirely."

The people-finder site still has your file. It still sells it. Anyone who goes to that site directly, or uses a different search engine, finds exactly what they found before. What gets removed is the shortcut.

There is a second limit that catches people. Google will not remove results from pages owned by educational institutions, government institutions, or newspapers. It treats those as public interest. So a county property record or a story in the local paper stays put.

For a real fix you need to go after the source, which means opting out at the data brokers themselves. That is slower and it is work. Do this one first anyway. It takes the results off the page where people actually look, and it keeps watching after.

Go look first

Before you set anything up, run the search. Your name, your town, in a private window.

Whatever comes back on that first page is the list you're working from, and it's the same list somebody looking for you will find.

What came up for you that you did not expect to be public? I'm curious which category surprises people most. joel@freshfromcache.com