How to clear / remove Google Search History and Stop Google from indexing your search history

San Francisco - Are you aware that Google has recently started storing your search history. It is not just limited to web search history, but encompasses image search, blog search, news search, product search, sponsored link search, video search, maps search and books search. In short every search you do on Google is not only logged but displayed to you too. Search history is stored even if you aren’t logged in to Google.

In this article I will explain how you can clear all your existing Google search history as well as prevent Google from keeping your search history in future. There is a caveat too.

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How to clear Google Web / Search … History and pause it

Log into Google Accounts and go to: https://www.google.com/history/

Here you can see all (according to Google) the search history that Google has about you. Google claims to use this search history to customize the search results to your taste.

BTW: It felt scary knowing how much information Google has about you. Should a key employee from Google decide to go rogue then a lot of people information and life would be at stake.

Click on Remove Items. Go to the very end of the page and click on Clear entire web history link. It will ask you to confirm:
“Are you sure you want to clear your entire web history? Your web history will also be paused.”

Click Clear History button. All your Google search history will be cleared and you will get an informational message:

“Your web history has been paused.
This service will not collect any history until you choose to resume.”

Is your web history really removed? The following answer has been adapted from Google privacy FAQ. Note the highlighted items.

What happens when I pause the service, remove items, or delete the Web History service?

You can choose to stop storing your web activity in Web History either temporarily or permanently, or remove items …. If you remove items, they will be removed from the service and will not be used to improve your search experience. As is common practice in the industry, Google also maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users. For example, we use this information to audit our ads systems, understand which features are most popular to users, improve the quality of our search results, and help us combat vulnerabilities such as denial of service attacks.

So while Google may disable the display of web history and may not customize your search results, it is still maintaining full log about all your activities on Google Sites and uses it to study your behavior and yes, improve the search quality and more. So following the Google recommended way and trusting Google to do what it says, you are still not rid of your biG brother. Google is still watching everything you do on Google’s sites.

How can you really get rid of Google tracking you?

You can use anonymizing services like tor with privoxy while accessing Google services. While it will not prevent Google from noting what you do, it will have a really hard time in associating the data to you or even to a single entity. Remember tor can be slow, sometimes disconnect and hamper your browsing experience.

The future?

Search history can be an amazing data. You can use it to find out a lot about the person even if you do not know his name like his interests, what interests him and when (so you can show appropriate ads to him at that time), does he have any subversive tendencies and so on. It can even be used to predict your future tendencies by correlating your data with others having the same pattern and what they did in the past.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is now or at a later date found cooperating with Government agencies in trying to find terrorists from their search pattern.What if Google is hacked and all your data exposed to hackers will malicious intentions?

It reminds me of two popular movies:

Minority Report Movie

Minority Report is a 2002 science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg and loosely based on the short story “The Minority Report” by Philip K. Dick. It is set primarily in Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia in the year 2054, where “Precrime”, a specialized police department, apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge provided by three psychics called “precogs”. Will Google, Bing & Yahoo be the three precogs of the future?

1984 Movie

Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes 1984) is a British film, released in 1984, based upon George Orwell’s novel of the same name, following the life of Winston Smith in Oceania, a country run by a totalitarian government.

Winston Smith endures a squalid existence in the totalitarian superstate of Oceania under the constant surveillance of the Thought Police. The story takes place in London, the capital of the territory of Airstrip One (Britain).

Winston works in a cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history in accordance with the agenda of the Party which rules Oceania under its supreme figurehead, Big Brother. A man haunted by painful memories and restless desires, Winston is an anti-hero and everyman who keeps a secret diary of his private thoughts, thus committing thoughtcrime — the crime of independent thought contrary to the aims of the Party.

It is hard to say what the future will be under the all-seeing and predicting eye of Big Brothers, but I am concerned. Are you?