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Manchester Evening News
Manchester Evening News
National
Ciaran Daly & Caitlin Griffin

The key change you need to make to permanently delete your Google search history

Google is an extremely helpful tool that gives you all the answers to questions both weird and wonderful. However, not everyone wants there to be digital evidence of what exactly they have been looking up on the web.

The search engine likes to save your browsing activity in order “to give you more personalized experiences, like app and content recommendations.”

Not everyone wants their search history saved though and some might have their own personal reasons for wanting to clear their browsing history. Whether that be because they don’t want people seeing their questionable searches or they want to protect their privacy - it’s a personal choice.

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However, according to the Daily Star, people haven’t been properly clearing their Google search history. The tech giant stores extensive data on your YouTube and Google search history on your account even if you delete it from your Internet browser.

It’s pretty simple to clear your YouTube searches, which only takes a few taps. Once you have clicked on the search bar in the app, press down on any suggested search results that have the History icon next to them before hitting 'Remove.’

However, if you don’t want YouTube to keep saving your searches from there on out, you need to head to your settings on the app. In there, you will find a ‘Manage all history’ tab where you will see an option called Saving YouTube history. All you have to do here is toggle off 'Include your searches on YouTube.'

If you have the Google app on an Andoid or iOS device, clearing your history is pretty much the same as how you removed it on YouTube - you can tap and hold on specific search results to clear them from your history.

But again, in order to delete the search history from your Google account you need to firstly tap on your account’s profile picture. This will lead you to the search history where you are given several choices. You can pick if you would like to delete your history ‘from all time’ or from a specific period of time in which you were browsing.

You can also change your Settings so that Search history auto-deletes. This can be done by hitting the Controls tab in the search history menu. Find the 'Web & App Activity card' and tap Auto-delete (On).

Your Google account should now be cleared of search history results. It’s important to note that if you delete Search history that’s saved to your Google account, you can’t get it back.

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