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How to Delete Your Internet Search History

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There are many reasons you may want to delete your internet search history, some of which are extremely valid. Here’s how to do it.

First off, browser history and search history are two different things. This how-to guide will show you how to delete your search history, and we’ll work on a separate guide for deleting your browser history in the very near future.

If you’re logged into your Google account, every single search that you do will be logged and stored in your Google Search history. Google can use this data to learn more about you as a person and cater future search results or even ads based on what you’ve searched for. However, if you’d rather not have Google judge you based on the things you search for, it’s probably a good idea to delete your search history.

I’ll be going over how you can delete your Google Search history on your desktop or laptop computer, as well as how to delete it on your mobile device.

Google Search History

Desktops or Laptops

To delete your Google Search history on your desktop or laptop computer, simply just follow these simple steps:

  • Navigate to www.google.com/history. You may be prompted to log in first if you’re not already.
  • You should see a screen that shows your past search activity. Go ahead and click the gear icon in the upper-right corner and then click Settings.

Screen Shot 2014-07-16 at 11.08.34 AM

 

  • In that paragraph of text, there will be a link over delete all. Click on that, and then click Delete All again when the pop-up appears.

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  • If you don’t want Google to continue tracking your search history, go ahead and click Turn Off. You’re all set!

Mobile Devices

There are several ways you can delete your Google Search history from a mobile device. You can open up your mobile web browser and go through the same steps as above, or you can do it through the Google Search app on iOS or Android. On Android, the process is exactly the same as the above steps. Just type in the URL above into the search bar in the Google Search app, and you’ll do exactly what’s shown above, but just on a smaller screen.

As for iOS users and the Google Search app, you’ll simply open it up and follow these steps:

  • Log into your Google account if you’re not already by tapping on Sign In in the upper-right corner.

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  • Next, tap on the Gear icon in the upper-left corner and navigate to Privacy > Browsing.
  • Tap on Clear on-device history, and tap it again when the pop-up appears.

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  • If you don’t want Google to continue tracking your search history on your iPhone or iPad, go ahead and flip the toggle switch to off next to On-device history.
  • Tap on Done in the upper-right corner to complete the task.

How to Prevent it in the First Place

So now that you deleted your search history, you probably don’t want Google to keep tracking your searches, and we already showed you a couple of ways to turn off search history once and for all.

However, another easy way to prevent Google from tracking your search history and linking it to your Google account is to simply just use Incognito Mode or Private Browsing Mode in your browser of choice. This opens a new window that keeps you logged out of any of your accounts and doesn’t save search or browser history at all. It’s a great method to use if you don’t feel like messing around with any settings in your Google account.

Otherwise, we would highly recommend that you take the time to change these settings on both your desktop or laptop and your mobile devices. You’ll be thankful you did.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Arun

    12/12/2014 at 3:25 am

    What the hell is wrong with display i dont know after the update it doesnot display the screen when someone calls ..
    I am getting irritated of the update.

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