In Google, Bing, and other search services, how do I remove a web page from their cache so that my data is no longer retrievable?

If you have information posted to a web page that was indexed by a web search service (e.g., Google), and you want to remove that data from the service's search results:

1. Remove the page file from its current directory, which should cause your web browser to return a standard 404 error message when directed to that page. Merely removing the content will not clear the cache of the search engines.
   
   
2. Initiate a request with the search service to clear your URL from the cache. For Google, use the Webpage Removal Request Tool. For Bing, see How to remove URLs from our index.
   
   
3. Place a robots.txt file to block future index crawling. See What are web search robots, and how do they affect me?

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