Question: I am a masters student at one of the top two universities in the UK and will be applying for PhD positions soon. When I google my (unique) name, the first few results are what you'd expect, my LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and some university web pages. 

However if you keep scrolling and go through the pages of Google's search results, you see some silly forum posts from when I was 12-14 years old, and some poorly written Yahoo Answers questions from the same time. I am now 22 so this was almost 10 years ago.

I know it's stupid but when I was that age no one really taught me how to use the internet properly and so ended up using my full name in a number of places.

I've not written anything offensive and my name isn't on anything objectively bad, but it's just childish silliness (memes, poorly written stories, Yahoo Answers nonsense, and just weird forum posts) and I'm a bit embarrassed to be honest. I feel like as I continue to progress academically, it will become more likely that people will Google me and see all this which might make it likely that I will be judged. Again, it's nothing offensive or objectionable just old young teenager stuff. Benign but embarrassing.

Should I just ignore it and hope that as my career develops these old results get pushed further back in Google's search results? Should I try to remove this stuff from the internet (very difficult as I have lost all these old accounts)?

The stuff I posted back then has little to nothing to do with who I am now professionally, and I would hate for people to think it is. Having a unique name does seem like a curse sometimes and I have made it worse by being extra foolish when I was young.

Answer: 
I'm deeply involved in web technologies, including search results. The simplest and fastest way to solve this problem is to add other search results. The more "legitimate" and positive results found, the less likely the others will be seen. There are numerous factors in raising search results, but still:

* Create another Stack Exchange account with your name and use it.
* Create social media accounts with your name.
* Join groups and use your real names (in addition to pseudonyms).
* Create a [Disqus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus) account with your name.

You don't need to make many posts on each site, but place professionally enhancing content there.

If you really want to spend time with this - open other accounts with simple variations of your name thus creating even more false results. 

A little work every day and soon you'll have 100s if not 1000s of positive results that will appear above the other silliness.
European Union privacy rules include certain aspects of the [right to be forgotten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten). I am not an expert on what this means precisely, but it seems to include the right to have search engines remove certain information associated with your name from search results.

[Here](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-request?complaint_type=rtbf) is another page provided by Google with more information and a form for submitting privacy-based requests for removal of search results. I assume other search engines will have similar procedures in place to comply with the EU rules.

Note that these rules apply in the EU. I suspect the embarrassing results associated with your name will still be available in non-EU countries. See [this](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/google-right-forgotten.html) related recent article where this somewhat controversial issue is discussed.