By Abhimanyu Ghoshal
Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, tricks, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and connected services.
Googles search service is great at helping you find stuff across the web, but all your queries also help the company build a profile of you it can use to target you with ads.
Thats what happens when you use most free services online, but you should have a choice to protect your privacy. There are alternatives that dont track you like DuckDuckGo but if you enjoy using Googlesearch, you can stick with it while periodically deleting your search history.
Note that this is different from your browser history, which tracks all the sites you visit on your device and stores that information locally. Your search history is basically all the queries youve entered into Google search or into Chromes omnibox when youre signed into either of them with your account.
Heres how to delete your search history:
1. Head to myactivity.google.com on your desktop and sign in with your account (if you arent already logged in).
2. In the left sidebar, click Delete activity by. Itll then bring up a form where you can set a date range through which your activity will be deleted, as well as the Google products that this will apply to.
3. To delete only your search history, set the date range, and then choose Search in the drop-down menu labeled All products.
4. Click Delete and youre done.
Alternatively, as of October 25, 2018, you can also review and delete your search history straight from Google search:
1. Visit the Google homepage on your desktop or mobile device where youre logged in, and then click on Settings > Your data in Search.
2. Youll then see options to review your search activity (which will bring you to Googles My Activity site), along with buttons to delete search history from the last hour, or all of it going back to 2005.
3. Choose any of these options, and youre good to go.
This article has been previously published on The Next Web.
Abhimanyu Ghoshal is an avid gamer, street food gourmet and design connoisseur.