Keep your privacy: delete your Google search history

While we browse the web, Google helps us remember a lot of information , such as sites we have visited, files downloaded… all this information is called your history. However, if you’re using a public computer or sharing it with someone, you might not want others to see all of this. And for this we tell you how you can do it (and how to maintain your privacy).

A Google record of our searches

delete your Google search history

We know that Google is the best performing search engine in the world. Although, with so many private searches taking place through Google, it’s important that you know how to easily delete your search history in order to protect your privacy.

And it is that, without being anything strange, Google frequently adds user data in order to sell advertising space to third parties. This is why deleting our search history can help protect what is our virtual privacy more satisfactorily .

In other words; If we access the search history, we will see a very complete record with all the searches we do on Google: general searches, Google Maps searches, image searches, news searches… We will be able to travel through a calendar (or rather, a machine from the time) to locate what searches we did on a specific day and we can also see activity graphs that will show us the days of the week or the hours in which we are most active.

How can we do it

Likewise, Google’s personalization resides in these types of records. That Google knows what we are looking for or what results we visit makes the personalization of the information it shows us much more effective and adapted to what we are looking for.

From the user’s point of view, it can be very useful for us to know that this resource exists to rescue some website that we do not remember and that, nevertheless, came from a search that we did with the Mountain View search engine. But if we seek privacy… this is not exactly the best.

And to do it, it is enough to adjust our preferences and delete that search history . On computer you can choose the auto delete option to delete the search history every 18 or 36 months or you can delete the history manually.

To do it manually, we will have to do it by accessing the browsing history when we are using the Google account.

  • We have to get to the Google My Activity screen, where all the activity appears: what you have seen, searched for and other data from your activity in the browser.
  • Once there, we go to the Google box and click on the X in the upper right corner.
  • Turn off Web & App Activity .
  • At this moment a pop-up window opens asking if we are sure that we want to delete the information about the searches.

With these steps, Google will eliminate the last pages that we have visited and will not register them nor will it use them when providing personalized content in the services it has.

Borrar historial búsquedas Google

We can also delete the location history

At the same time, and if what you are also looking for is a way to protect a little what may be the history of the sites we have been to , perhaps the best thing to do is to delete the history and eliminate the automatic collection of this data. To do this, just follow these steps:

  • Go to the locations settings of your Google account.
  • Turn off Location History .
  • Tap Manage Activity and delete your location history from Google.