A Google decision email is not a broadcast. It is a decision about one index, for some queries, in some regions. Australians can be forgiven for treating it as the internet. Google’s share of search in this country has sat so high for so long that the other drawers look like hobbies. They are not hobbies if a recruiter uses Safari, if a journalist uses DuckDuckGo as a point of pride, or if a relative abroad is searching your name on Bing because that is what the Windows box opened.
If you remember one distinction from this piece, make it this one: who owns the index. DuckDuckGo is not a third crawler in the sense people mean. Brave is. Yandex is. Apple’s leftover cards are a mix of device cache and a search product that has changed suppliers more than once. Filing the same personal-information form three times at Google will not reach any of them. The Google Search removal guide is still where most Australian files should start. This piece is the list we run after that start, so that a clean google.com.au is not mistaken for a clean name.
Bing, which is a real search engine
Bing has its own crawler, its own cache, its own webmaster tools, and its own content-removal products. It is not a mirror of Google that updates overnight. We have sat with files where a URL had been gone from Google for a month and was still the first Bing result for the same name.
Two doors matter.
Bing Webmaster Tools, if you control the host. URL inspection, URL removal, and a block that will hold while you finish a 410. The same status-code rules apply as on Google: a soft 404 and a sitemap that still lists the path will undo the hide. Read the de-indexing guide before you treat Webmaster as a reputation product. It is a freshness product for a site you already own.
Bing’s content-removal and legal paths, if you do not control the host. Personal information, intimate images, child sexual abuse material, and court orders have their own forms, with the same appetite for exact URLs and the same disinterest in “this article is unkind.” Attach the order. Quote the paragraph. List every path.
Bing’s cache is as sticky as Google’s and is a separate URL. Nominate it if people are opening it. Bing also draws knowledge cards from its own graph. A de-indexed URL will not rebuild a card that is still reading Wikipedia. Yahoo, and several “alternative” engines you will meet in a privacy blog, are Bing-powered in a lot of markets. Cleaning Bing is how you clean those. Cleaning Google and then writing to Yahoo is how you lose a week.
DuckDuckGo is mostly Bing in a different coat
DuckDuckGo sells privacy, not a crawler the size of the two majors. Its web results have, for years, been substantially powered by Bing. That is the operational fact, and the one a surprising number of Australian privacy-conscious searchers do not want to hear.
The practical consequence is simple. A Bing removal usually clears DuckDuckGo. A Google removal usually does not. If the leftover that is referring people is a DDG link, open the same query on Bing. If Bing still has the URL, you have a Bing job. If Bing is clean and DDG is not, you have a DDG-specific leftover — a bang, an instant answer, or a cache of their own — and you use DuckDuckGo’s own removal or legal address for that object.
DuckDuckGo will take reports for illegal content and for some privacy claims. It will not unpublished a news article because you asked it to be more private than the masthead. Do not send DDG a list of every URL you have already filed at Google and call it a programme. Send the URL that DDG is actually showing, and say whether Bing still has it.
Brave, which does not copy the majors
Brave Search is the engine people file last because they assume it is a skin. It is not. Brave operates its own index. It will recrawl a page you have already 410’d for Google and Bing, and it will keep a result that both of the majors have dropped. If a Brave URL is referring people, you treat it as a third ticket.
The method does not change because the documentation is thinner. Exact URL. Proof of standing. Status code on the origin. A legal document if you have one. If you control the host, block the Brave crawler only after the page is gone; blocking a crawler while the article still 200s is how you freeze a skeleton result. Any crawler allowed to fetch a public 200 can build a card. The way you shrink that list is at the source, not by collecting brand names.
Yandex, and the indexes you only meet once
Yandex is a Russian search engine with its own webmaster tools and its own legal culture. It still appears in the files of people who have an unusual name or a piece of content that circulated in Russian. It does not appear in most Australian name searches. When it does, Google’s decision email is irrelevant.
Yandex Webmaster will take a URL removal from a verified owner. Its legal and personal-data paths are not a copy of California’s, and they are not a copy of the OAIC’s. If the harm is a Yandex result being opened in Australia, file there with the URL and the order you actually have. If the harm is that a relative in another country is searching on Yandex, say so, and do not expect an Australian eSafety notice to be a document they recognise.
Other national indexes — Baidu, and a long tail of regional engines — show up in diaspora files and almost nowhere else. The method is the same and the paperwork is local. Do not stop at Google and then announce the internet is clean.
Apple Spotlight leftovers
This is the leftover that makes people think their phone is possessed. You have cleaned Google. You have even cleaned Bing. On an iPhone, Spotlight still throws up a Safari suggestion, a Siri card, or a news headline from 2019. Three different objects get collapsed into “Apple still has it.”
Local device history. Safari, Spotlight and Siri suggestions on your phone will keep offering pages you once opened. Clearing history and the relevant Siri toggles is a device job. It does not de-index the URL for anyone else. It is still worth doing, because the person who writes to us is often being haunted by their own phone.
Apple’s search cards. Spotlight and Safari suggestions have used more than one web index over the life of the product. What a stranger’s iPhone shows is not your Safari cache. It is Apple’s own suggestion layer, which may be reading Bing, a Google licence, or Apple’s own crawl, depending on the year and the region. There is no public “Spotlight removal” form for an ordinary Australian URL. Cleaning the underlying indexes, and taking the source down, is still the work.
News and Knowledge-style cards inside Spotlight follow the same rule as a Google panel: they are reading a source. If the source is a live masthead, you are in the news-archive business. If the source is a dead URL that only Apple is still displaying, capture it and take it to the index you can actually name.
Do not factory-reset a phone because Spotlight remembered a headline. Do not ignore Spotlight because “it is only my device” if the screenshot you were sent came from someone else’s device.
A sequence that covers the drawers people actually use
- Capture the referring results on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, and, if it is in the file, Yandex. One incognito window each. Date them.
- Finish the source work. A live 200 will refill every index you clean.
- File Google, then Bing, for every URL that qualifies. Treat DDG as done when Bing is done, then recheck.
- File Brave only for the URLs Brave is showing. File Yandex only for the URLs Yandex is showing.
- If a Wayback capture is the leftover, stop using search forms. That is archive work.
- On Apple devices, clear the local suggestions so you can see what is actually still on the public web.
- Diary ninety days. New scrapes appear. New indexes fetch them.
Agencies that sell “full search de-indexing” and deliver a Google receipt are selling the part of the job that photographs well. The rest of the job is this list. It is tedious. It is finite. It is not a spell.
If you want the desk to look at a general question about the other indexes, use contact. Do not send the court file or a spreadsheet of every engine you have heard of. We publish method. We do not run your case.