How To Stop Google Storing Your Search History
There is increasing concern these days about the amount of data stored by different websites relating to the online activities of their users. One of the prime targets of this concern is Google, which covers not only the search engine itself but also the Google user accounts that enable log in to Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, to name but three Google-owned services. In this article we will explain how to keep to a minimum the amount of data stored in your Google account.
Almost everyone nowadays uses Google to search the internet. At the same time there are a lot of people who search Google while logged in to a Google account, for example a Gmail account. You may not be aware but a default setting on a Google account is to retain a user’s ‘Web History’. What this means is that Google searches performed while you are logged in are stored as part of your account settings. The benefit of this to you is that previous searches are taken into account when a new search is carried out, and the results of the new search may be more biased towards what you want to see, in terms of websites you may have visited before.
On the other hand, you may prefer to have a standard search, and also not have your data stored by Google. The latter issue could be a worry for anyone who shares a computer and does not want others to find out what searches they have been performing on Google.
To turn off Google’s ‘Web History’ feature, you should go to the settings page of your Google account, and then click on ‘Web History’. The default setting is for ‘Web History’ to be turned on. To disable it, click on ‘Pause Web History’. On the same page you can also delete all or selected items that were previously stored when ‘Web History’ was enabled.
When Google first introduced what it calls ‘Personalized Search’, it was enabled only for logged in users with ‘Web History’ turned on. In 2009, this was changed so that non logged in users would also receive ‘Personalized Search’. This is achieved by storing cookies in your browser. Therefore if you do not want this data to be stored, you should clear Google cookies when exiting your browser.
