Nowadays almost everyone uses Google to find over the web. When you use Google to search something on web, Google stores your search terms and visited URLs. Why? Because Google uses these information to deliver more relevant,  recommended and personalized search results for further search. That means your past searches will reflect the results of new searches. Generally Google calls it “Web History“.

But if you don’t have enthusiasm on this or want to stop it for any reason, you can set Google not to do it and google will no more customize your new search results with search history or web activity.

Note: Even if you remove or disable web history, Google still sore them as log on their server for some days to analyze with those and make better service for their users.

When Google first introduced “Personalized Search”, it was only for logged in users with “Web History” turned on. In 2009, this was changed so that non logged in users would also benefited by “Personalized Search. This is achieved by storing cookies in your browser. Therefore if you do not want this data to be stored, clearing browser cookies of Google can solve it.

So the process of removing or disabling web history involves different for logged-in and logged-out users. Instead of the procedure mentioned below,  web history setting can also be accessed from Google Dashboard which I’ve shared earlier. For signed-in users it’s called “Web History” and for signed-out users it’s only “Search History“.

#For Signed-in users

At the top-right corner of Google , click on the gear icon and select “Web History” from the drop-down menu (or you can access this page directly from https://www.google.com/history/). Google may ask for password for re-authentication.

Now if you want to remove certain or all history, then use “Remove” or “Remove All Web History“.

To disable or Pause the web history function, simply click on “Pause“. You can enable it later by clicking on “resume”.

#For Signed-Out users

When you’re not signed in, Google customizes your search experience based on past search information linked to your browser, using a cookie(already said above). Google stores up to 180 days of signed-out search activity linked to your browser’s cookie, including queries and results you click.

To disable it, use the Gear icon at the top-right corner or directly go to https://www.google.com/history/(same as for logged-in).

Now click “Disable customizations based on search activity“. You are done. Hope it helps.