Give Someone an Hour
An adversary does not need weeks on you. Give someone an hour and open sources and they will map a life. So take the hour first, and run it on yourself. Not to feel better. To produce a written baseline you can measure against later.
Start by stripping the personalization. A search run in your normal, logged-in browser is shaped by your account, your history, your location, and your network. Log out. Open a private window. Cut as much identifying signal as you reasonably can. That moves the result toward an outsider's view.
Then read what comes back as a rough prompt, not as the adversary's picture. Location and network still bend it. You are looking at a hint about where to go dig. Anyone who tells you that searching your own name shows what a stranger sees is selling you a broken tool.
Work a Finite List
The real audit is a named site list and the records underneath it. Consumer Reports checked a named list of 13 people-search sites. Across 28 participants it found 332 instances of personal information, about 12 profiles per person. The study sample was 32 volunteers overall (n=32).
A list of 13 is a task with an end. When a service tells you that you appear on 200 or more sites, that is a description of its own coverage, not a measurement of you. Work the finite list. Write down every hit. That is your baseline.
These are the 13 sites Consumer Reports checked (n=32). The list is the study's, and it is here as a checklist rather than as a recommendation or an endorsement of any of them: BeenVerified, CheckPeople, ClustrMaps, Dataveria, Intelius, MyLife, Nuwber, PeopleFinders, PublicDataUSA, Radaris, Spokeo, ThatsThem, Whitepages. Put them in a column in a plain document, run your own name and your address against each one, and write down what comes back and the date you looked. That column is the task with an end.
The Pointer Is Not the Record
Google operates its own removal path for personal information in Search. Use it. Then read what Google says about it: removing a result that shows your personal information does not mean the information is gone from the internet. Approved or denied, it still sits on the page that published it.
That is the whole discipline in one line. Removing the pointer is not removing the record. This is the audit Scopos runs professionally. Today you run the short version yourself.