Jacquilynne 1, Google 10^100
I win!
Ha!
A long time ago, in a University not so very far away, I wrote a web journal entry about a friend's fiancee (who shall remain nameless to avoid a repeat of the previous fiasco) and a conversation we'd had about the slightly risque subject of strip clubs. It was a very funny conversation, and a reasonably funny journal entry and people laughed and that was the end of that.
At least, that was the end of that until late last year, when said fiancee (by then, long since husband) got a new job, with a new boss who was both very slightly web aware and a bit of a prude. Googling on the name of his new employee, what did the boss discover but that the second entry on Google was my journal entry. About new employee and strip clubs. Well, new boss was very concerned about the image this might present to clients and asked that it be removed.
Easier said than done, I'm afraid.
The journal was hosted on geocities, on an account I no longer used, which was tied to an email address I no longer had access to. I did eventually manage to recover the password and deleted the site as a whole. Unfortunately, I had failed to account for Google's peculiarities - namely that pages which disappear are not de-cached or de-indexed, but assumed to be merely missing for awhile.
Fine, I thought, I'll ask Google to re-index the page so they can see that it's gone. But I can't do that without having an actual page there. So I go in and recreate a blank page, not enough. I go in and recreate a page with actual content, link to it from somewhere else, and ask Google to re-index it. Finally, after about 6 months of trying, Google has cleared their cache of that page and stopped returning it as one of the primary results.
How long is 6 months in internet years?