Google makes it way easier to delete your search history

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With just a couple of taps you can erase your Google search history.
With just a couple of taps, you can erase everything Google has stored about your search history.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

Your iPhone does everything it can to protect your privacy, but using Google’s services punches a gaping hole in that protection. Google took a small step toward increasing user privacy by making it much easier to delete your search history.

Google doesn’t just save the terms your looked for, but also the pages you visited as part of the search. Both collections can be erased.

An official Google blog post promises that “from directly within Search, you can review or delete your Search activity and quickly get back to finding what you were searching for.”

How to delete your Google search history

To delete the search information this company has stored about you, go to Google.com on your iPhone, iPad or another computer. Click on the menu button in the upper left corner. From the resulting dropdown, choose Your data in Search. That will open a page; scroll down until you see Delete your Search activity. You have the choice to delete the last hour of search terms or everything  ever collected about your search activity.

Before doing so, you can look over the search terms you’ve used (and the websites you’ve visited while searching). Just scroll up on the page to Your Search activity.

Also on this page, you will find other relevant privacy settings, such as controls for ads that Google displays while you search.

These new features are available today on both the mobile and desktop versions of the Google Search webpages. The same capabilities will be added to the company’s iOS and Android apps in coming weeks. This huge software developer also promises “next year, we’ll expand this to Maps, followed by many other Google products.”

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