When someone searches for your name on search engines (for example Google or Yahoo) they can find your Facebook public search instance ( which includes a thumbnail, your name as recorded on Facebook database, your regional network, friends etc).
You can avoid your public profile to be crawled by search engines, so people won’t find you anymore.
In order to do so, please follow these steps:
1. Login to your Facebook account.
2. Go to Settings -> Privacy Settings. (see image below.)
3. Select Search. (see image below.)
4. Deselect the following checkbox: “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing.” (see image below.)
5. Press Save Changes.
In about a month or maybe less your profile will be removed from the search engine result pages.
after i click on search, what appears on my screen is different from what you have displayed on #4. what can i do ? also, i would like to know if i can hide my friend list from people that are not on my friend list. if yes, how ?
@Chilli, Hi there, i’m sorry, the 4th step isn’t available now, because facebook has improved their customer’s privacy concerns. I tried to access it and perform the steps i created, i can’t proceed to step 4 anymore because after i performed the 3rd step which is to click “Search”, facebook automatically pops out a message saying “Worried about search engines? Your information is safe.
There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.”
Regarding your question if you can hide your friends list. I think you can do that by follow the 1 and 2 steps above and on step 3 click “Profile Information”
Though i haven’t tried hiding my friends list from people that are not on my friend list, i think it’s worth to try. Try to explore things. Good luck! Cheers!