Google does offer to help with urgent requests to prevent personal content from appearing in a search result, such as when credit card or Social Security numbers are accidentally or maliciously published on the Web. If you do manage to successfully remove such an item, you'll need to also make sure that Google no longer caches the information, the representative says.

If legal action is prohibitively complicated and Google and other search engines can't help, what's the best tactic for getting something erased? A little digital digging and a lot of good old-fashioned human contact.

Priority No. 1 is to try to reach a human being, says Chris Martin, founder of , an online reputation management service. His company starts by tracking down someone who has access to the Web site in question -- either the author of the material or a third party like a webmaster or Web hosting service. "If the Web host is billing that person every month, if it's a paid account, they'll be able to contact them," Martin says.

The talking cure

If that approach fails, his company tries to reach people through various social media sites such as or or Web portals like Yahoo.