The Simple Way to Delete Your Google Search History

Google search data can be a very private thing. While Google itself may be intent on keeping a record of your keystrokes, you may have a number of reasons why you don’t want the site to maintain a memory of what you’ve typed into the search engine.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to address that. Abhimanyu Ghoshal at The Next Web recently broke down a simple process for deleting your search history from the site. Using your Google account, log in to myactivity.google.com and look for “Delete Activity by” on the lefthand sidebar. You can customize a date range to scrub your history from “Search” in the dropdown menu.

Google also allows you to delete your history directly from the search page, provided you’re logged in to your Google account. Click on “Settings,” then find “Your Data in Search.” From there, you can head to myactivity.google.com, or use the toolbar to delete your history.

Note that these actions don’t erase your search history from your browser. On Chrome, you can wipe out that data by accessing “History” on the browser toolbar and selecting “Clear Browsing Data" along with a date range.

While these steps work for scrubbing search data, Google still accumulates a considerable amount of information through advertising, cell phone locations, calendar appointments, and other applications.