Help! How to remove old judgment from Google / PlainSite?

[Anonymous]

@RobertEG - As I mentioned above, I obtained the info on my case by searching the online records, which are given on the website for the superior court of my county.

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Search Civil Cases by case number or by last name, first name

On this site, you can look up Unlimited/Limited Civil, Family Law, Probate, and Small Claims cases by case number or by case name for cases filed from 1987 to present.

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I searched for my name... there is only the one case. I searched again for the case no. and got the same result. The judgment was filed in Oct 2008. The last action was in Nov 2008 when the creditor obtained an abstract of the judgment. (These are the same details as posted on plainsite.) The online case record shows no further action, therefore the judgment is expired as of Oct 2018, by Calif. law.

Do you think I need to also go in person to the court clerk to confirm what they have online?

Plainsite doesn't care whether a case is expired or not. As long as it's part of the public record, it's on their site and on Google search results for my name. That result doesn't appear on my name searches via Bing or Yahoo; I haven't tried any other search engines than those three.

[Anonymous]

That was quick. I've received two email replies from plainsite. The first reply appears to be computer-generated and conforms to their Privacy Policy rules for denying removal:

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Thank you for getting in touch with us about your docket on PlainSite. After reviewing the details of your request and the associated docket, we have come to the following decision:

Your request regarding [XXXXXX] has been denied.

Based on our research, the following factors were used to make this determination:

• Your case appears to involve a sum of money greater than $2,500.00.
• Your case is popular and has received numerous hits, and is therefore of public interest.

If you do not agree with our decision, please keep in mind that you still may have several options, including filing a motion, such as a motion to seal, before the court or administrative agency responsible for the records in question. Typically individuals are not required to hire lawyers to file such motions, and examples are available on PlainSite.

You can also consult our Privacy Policy to learn more about why public access to government records is important, and how we make our decisions.

Best regards,

The PlainSite Team

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Most of those "popular" clicks are mine, as I have repeatedly checked the site for several months now, in horror.

The second email reply came from an actual staff person:

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Thank you for reaching out to us with this information. While we do not see sufficient reason to suppress the entirety of the docket, we have abbreviated your name to avoid indexing by search engines. Per our Privacy Policy:

• Name abbreviation. In some cases where we feel that there is a strong public interest in keeping information available, but a particular person's privacy interests are also strongly compromised, we will on rare occasion modify names contained in public documents and replace them only with initials to avoid the indexing of the names by search engines.

Regards,

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I can see that they've already made the change on plainsite. However, my full name still comes up on Google. Does anybody know how long it will take for Google to show the change? This is agony.

[FireMedic1]

It will go away in time. Google spiders crawl sites and thats how you end up in their search engines. Once Google picks up the change it will be changed. If you have a Google account. Go to Google Webmaster and try to have the URL deleted from their search. The webmaster of the site may not delete it. Or they may not catch it and it will be removed from Google's cached pages.

[Anonymous]

I'm inclined to just wait it out. I've put my apartment hunting on hold for now.

Meanwhile, today I visited the County Clerk and got confirmation that nothing was filed after 2008, and there are no other case records for me except that one old judgment. Then I went to a free legal aid service and got confirmation that the judgment, being past the 10-year mark without renewal, is now expired and cannot be enforced. The legal aid team gave me three organizations that might be able to assist me with the possibility of filing a motion to seal the record or some other way to protect my privacy from search engines. I'll make those calls tomorrow morning. More news as it breaks.....

[FireMedic1]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I'm inclined to just wait it out. I've put my apartment hunting on hold for now.

Meanwhile, today I visited the County Clerk and got confirmation that nothing was filed after 2008, and there are no other case records for me except that one old judgment. Then I went to a free legal aid service and got confirmation that the judgment, being past the 10-year mark without renewal, is now expired and cannot be enforced. The legal aid team gave me three organizations that might be able to assist me with the possibility of filing a motion to seal the record or some other way to protect my privacy from search engines. I'll make those calls tomorrow morning. More news as it breaks.....

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Great work! Good Luck............