How do I delete Google search history?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com, giving you more confidence and hopefully
a little less fear dealing with your technology.
So Google search history is one of those things that people ask me about often.
They're concerned for some reason that somebody might stumble upon some
of the things that they've searched for in the past.
There are a couple of different things you
need to look at if you're concerned about this, and we'll dive right in.
So the first thing, I'm going to go over here to actually
Google.com and just see if I'm even signed in.
I am.
So that means that anything that I've been
searching for in Google has been getting associated with my Google account.
So this is actually an easy one to take care of.
Where we'll go is myactivity Google.com.
This is the activity associated with my Google account.
You can see that there's actually a fair amount of activity here.
I searched for a few things. I visited Google.
I searched for recovered Gmail password, and in fact, I searched for something I
shouldn't really search for as an example, of course.
So how do I deal with this?
Well, right now I've got it not filtered.
We can filter by date.
So you can actually change the scope of what we're about to do.
I'm not going to do that here because I honestly believe most of the times,
people are more concerned about just getting rid of everything.
But understand that you can filter what's
going on and only delete portions of your search history.
Instead, I'm just going to click on delete.
Now here, I again have an opportunity
to choose the range of what it is I'm going to delete.
I'm going to delete all time.
These are the things that it will delete.
These are the things that will be deleted from Google's records.
If I hit delete, it does so, and we're done.
And you can see now that there is no activity.
Google no longer has any of the activity associated with my account.
Now there's something that's very, very important to understand here.
Google did not delete your activity.
Google removed the association between your activity and your account.
In other words, they still keep track of what everybody is searching for.
They use this for a bunch of different purposes, including understanding what
to prioritize, how SEO is going, what the trends are that people are
looking for, all sorts of different things.
But that's all tracked, quote, unquote, anonymously.
In other words, without the association to your account, you need to trust that.
You need to trust that.
Yeah, Google's actually deleted the association.
However, there's still a catch 22 here because
of course, Google, like any good technology company, they have backups.
So the information that they had yesterday that associated your search history
with your account, theoretically, it's still there.
We don't know how long they keep it.
We also don't know when they use it.
But if you find yourself in a situation
where you are potentially at risk or under the interest of law
enforcement, then it is theoretically possible.
Law enforcement could come to Google
and say, hey, let us know what Leo is looking for.
He deleted his search history.
That's suspicious.
Do you have it in your backups from when before he deleted it?
If that's the case, then it may still be recoverable.
It's just not in your control.
Now, there is one other situation that I
wanted to clarify, and that is simply this.
I'm currently signed into my Google account.
If I sign out and I don't sign into another account,
I just go back to Google.com. You can see here that there is a sign in button.
Yes, any searches I do here will be
recorded in that same general anonymous sense.
However, there's no account to associate them with.
So there's nothing for me to delete because there's nothing that's being
recorded that would be directly associated with my own Google account.
But wait, there's more.
We've now looked at the online history,
the information that's been kept by Google in their servers about your activity.
A lot of people tend to forget about their own computers.
There is a history here too.
And in fact, if I hit Control H in this
browser, you'll see that all of a sudden I've got this nice long history
of everything that I've been doing, including my searches,
including my sign in, including my activity and other things.
The whole point here is that this is here I'm going to click on Open History page,
and we can see that there's actually a fair amount of information here that is
in this browser associated with my activity.
If I want to clear it.
That's the Clear browsing data button.
I also often use Control Shift Delete
to bring this up because that's a shortcut that we often use for clearing cookies,
clearing history, clearing the browser cache.
Now, in this case, I'm not going to clear my cookies.
I'm not going to clear my cache, although you might as well.
It doesn't really matter.
I'm not going to clear any of this other stuff.
The stuff that we care about is your
browsing history and your download history.
Those are the tracks that you're typically
trying to erase when you're concerned about history at all.
I'm going to change the time range to be again all time.
I want to make sure that everything gets deleted.
Now I'll hit Clear now.
Now I will have that deleted from this browser.
But wait, there's more.
If I were signed in to a logging or
synchronization feature by this browser, provided by this browser, as I am right,
I am signed into my Microsoft account for this Edge browser so that all
of my settings are synchronized across my other browsers.
Well, theoretically deleting my history,
deleted it on all of those other instances on all my other machines,
but if one of them were offline, that might not happen.
Will it get deleted when it comes back online?
I would hope so, but we don't know for sure.
So it is something else you need to be aware of that.
If you are signed into a synchronization service, not only is your history being
replicated across all the instances of that same browser,
be it Chrome or Edge or Firefox or any of the others that offer this service,
but when it comes time to delete, you probably want to take extra care
to make sure that it's truly been deleted everywhere.
I hope that's helpful.
I hope that is something that is one
of those things that you never, ever need to use.
I do have to say that, yes,
browsing history kind of sort of seems like it's forever when we start talking
about things like backups, your own PC backups, Google's backups, and so forth.
But it's also not really forever,
because for most of us, there's really not that much interest in what we're up to.
But if you find yourself in that position,
yeah, covering your tracks can be complicated and take multiple steps.
Hope this helps.
For comments, for updates,
for links related to this topic and more, visit askle.com/151014.
I'm Leo. Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.