Do you have personal or sensitive information on a website that was removed, but is still appearing in the search result of popular search engines like Google and Bing? If your answer is yes, it means that you may need to send a request to the Search Engines to have this content removed.
If your information was posted on a website by you or someone else, it would have been stored and analyzed by a search engine's crawler or Bot in a temporary area called a Cache.
A search engine Crawler or a Bot is a computer program that searches the internet for information and catalogs this information to make it easy for you to find what you are looking for. The internet consists of billions of web pages with tonnes of information that would be virtually impossible to find without a search engine.
Why do Search Engines store information for the websites that they visit?
In order to catalog the vast amount of information on the internet, the Crawlers or Bots store a snapshot of the pages in a temporary location called a Cache or an Index.
We do not know how long a search engine will store this snapshot for, but Search Engines do cache pages just in case the original web page or information is no longer accessible due to the following reasons:
- web page inaccessible due to internet traffic congestion
- website down
- web page was removed
How do I remove my information from a search engine cache?
To remove information temporarily stored or cached by popular search engines Google and Bing, please click on the links below to send a removal request:
We will continue to add the links for other search engines once we are able to locate them. If you know of a removal link that is not listed above, please post it in the comment section below.
Please remember, although you have removed information from a web site or page, it doesn't necessarily mean that the information will be immediately removed from internet. So, be careful of what you put online or on the internet.