How to Prevent Google From Saving your Search & Web History not to Get Personalized Search Results

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.

Prevent Certain Sites form Appearing in Google Search Results without any Browser Extension or Plugin

If you use to search Google over the web very often, I’m sure that you’ve annoyed with many spammy websites which builds new pages for every keywords they find by their users. Then these sites makes these pages visible to search engines. When your google search term matches with their titles they come up in front of you (Though Google is always trying it’s best to deliver best links). That’s very irritating. whenever you browse into that site, you don’t get what we expected!

So you may need a system to personally block these types of junk sites.

Some months ago I’ve shared about a Google chrome extension called “Personal Block List” which is intended to do this task. If installed, a link “Block ***” will be shown with the every link in search result. The big advantage of it is you can use it instantly whenever you need it because it’s always visible with google search links and at the top-right corner of chrome. And disadvantage is it’s only for chrome.

But today while I was on preference page of google search, I found a way to block sites where you don’t need any extension. Because this system will use your Google account to store data. Advantage is you can use it for any browser. The main drawback is you cannot instantly access it as ‘personal block list’. You will always need to come to preferences page to add or remove sites.

Note: It’s only for logged-in users.

How to do it:

Click on the Gear icon at the top right corner of google then click “Search Settings” or directly go to http://www.google.com/preferences .

Now at the bottom of the preference page, find-out the field “Blocked Sites“. Click on “Manage Blocked Sites“.

Now you add site links which you don’t want to get on search.

For example, I’ve added softonic.com which I really hate for it’s spammy behavior.