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How To Clear Search History on iPhone

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Here is a guide on how to clear your recent search history on your iPhone.

The iPhone is truly great mobile internet browser and utilizing the Safari app is likely a huge part of every users’ day. In addition to standard maintenance, there are multiple reasons why someone may want to clear their search history.

If there was potentially a gift for someone in recent browser history and you wanted to keep it private, there are ways to remove your browsing history on the phone.

How to Clear Search History on iPhone

Here is a guide with steps on how to delete your browsing history on your iPhone

Watch the video for more information on cleaning your iPhone’s browser history.

Private Browsing

This is a good place to start when on the topic of clearing history as iOS’ Private Browsing mode within Safari is designed to not track any history.

By opening a new browser window and Safari and then tapping the windows icon, you will see text labeled Private appear in the bottom left hand corner.

PrivateBrowsing

Tapping this Private icon will open a new browser window within Safari, however it will have black borders instead of the traditional white. This is a visual indication that the iPhone is browsing Privately and will not track your acitivity.

This is an excellent way to save yourself the trouble of clearing any browser data if you just need to do a quick search without tracking your usage.

Clear Individual Sites

Within Safari’s history tab (Bookmarks -> History), you will see all of your recently viewed links. There is the ability to swipe and delete to remove individual websites.

Many people may not want to clear out all recent history as they may have been logged in to a site or have a recent search they will need later so this is an excellent way to eliminate small bouts of activity by deleting incrementally.

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This swipe to delete functions properly through all time periods of your browsing history so even scrolling further into the past will still allow deletion of single items.

Clear Full History

Within the same Safari History tab, you will also notice a Clear icon in the bottom right hand side. This will do just as it claims and clears out all of your items currently appearing in History.

This is a great way to delete all of your recent data in one fell swoop and will eliminate the need to erase individual link visits one by one.

Clear History and Website Data

One final way of clearing your tracks within Safari is to navigate to the Settings App and then to the Safari tab.

Scrolling to the bottom of that tab will show a blue text stating Clear History and Website Data.

Tapping this will warn “ Clearing will remove history, cookies, and other browsing data. History will be cleared from Devices signed into your iCloud account.” This last part is very important as you are not only deleting browsing data from your current device but all devices currently using that iCloud account.

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If iCloud does not have the Safari tab enabled, you will not get this alert yet most people will have it enabled so except to see History and browsing data erased from your Mac and iPad as well.

There are many reasons why clearing data may be necessary and fortunately Apple has made doing so fairly straightforward. My personal recommendation would be to use Private Browsing to avoid any further maintenance to delete unwanted browsing data. There are options to erase where you have been yet Private Browsing is a great fail safe browsing tool.

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