Your search history contains some of the most personal information you will ever reveal online: your health, mental state, interests, travel locations, fears and shopping habits.
And that is information most people would want to keep private. Unfortunately, your web searches are carefully tracked and saved in databases, where the information can be used for almost anything, including highly targeted advertising and price discrimination based on your data profile.
Fortunately, Google, Microsoft's Bing and smaller companies provide ways to delete a search history or avoid leaving one, even if hiding from those ads can be more difficult.
Google makes it easy to find your personal web history, manage it and even delete it. Just go to google. com/history and log in to your Google account. There, you will see your entire history and can browse it by category.
If you would like this history to go away, click the gear icon in the upper right of the page and choose Settings. Here, you can turn off search history, so Google won't save future searches. You can delete your history from Google's database or just remove specific items from your recent history.
You can turn off and erase your search history on Microsoft Bing at bing.com/profile/history. Yahoo lets you turn off future search histories but doesn't have a way to delete the old one.