(Archived) Evernote Notes are discoverable via Google Search!!

[m021478 0]

I have a persistent Google Alert search setup that emails me whenever anything new shows up on the net with my name on/in it...I just got an email today which had a link to one of my Evernote notes that contained my full name within the note...In other words, I had no idea that my evernote notes were available to online for the whole world to see and have access to?? Is this correct??

Is there anyway to switch this off and somehow turn off the 'Hello World' discoverablility of my evernote notes so that only people who know my evernote password can access my notes?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated... Thanks!

[engberg 89]

Your notes are not available unless you put them in a Public notebook. Notebooks are private by default, so they only become Public if you change their status in the notebook properties screen.

If notes are in a Public notebook, they may be indexed by search engines. We don't actively promote your public notebooks to the search engines, but if they find any link to one of your public notebooks, they will probably crawl to it.

In a few months, we plan to add more options for selectively sharing your notebooks with individual people, but right now there are only two options: private and public.

[crispinb 8]

This was one of the first things I considered when trying Evernote. I have to use a public notebook because at the moment it's the only way to get a permalink. So early on I added some public notes containing unique strings, and a couple of months later I still don't get hits when searching for those in public search engines (I haven't linked to those notes from any generally-accessible web pages).

I don't think the URL structure of the public notebooks is spiderable, so unless there are direct links to notes somewhere out there on the web, I don't see how search engines can find them.

[engberg 89]

crispin is correct ... in theory, if you make a notebook public and then don't put the URL anywhere that a search engine can access, then it shouldn't get indexed. (I.e. we don't "tell" Google about your public notebooks.)

We recoginze, of course, that this is just "security through obscurity", which is why we plan to add additional controls for sharing and collaboration in a few months.