Whether you’re just looking to hide your Google searches for a birthday present or you’re concerned about your Internet privacy, it’s important to know the best ways to keep your Internet search history private.
Here are six of the most important ways to do it, as advised by Mike James and Best VPN.
1. Sign out of your Google profile
If you have a profile on any of Google’s services such as Gmail, YouTube or Google Plus you will be signed into that most of the time. That means that any search that you carry out through Google will be registered under that account. This is the first step you need to take to ensure that your search is private. Even if you use the ideas below, they won’t matter if you’re signed into your Google account while you search. The same goes if you use other search engines like Bing or Yahoo – make sure you sign out of your account first.
2. Use Private Browsing mode
Every modern browser has a ‘private’ mode that allows you to surf the web without the browser remembering anything about what you have been looking at. It should be noted that this won’t stop your internet service provider (ISP) or other online services from seeing what you are doing, but it will stop your history from being saved. So someone else using the browser after you would not be able to see which sites you had been accessing.
3. Adjust your history settings
If you are looking to keep your internet search history private all the time without having to constantly open a ‘private mode’ window, you can do so by changing the default history settings in your browser. You can set your browser to delete any searching history at the end of every session, so it will be like using private mode all the time. This erases any history as well as the cache and cookies from the websites you visited.
4. Use a VPN
You may never have heard of a VPN, but they are actually one of the most commonly used tools for keeping your search history private. VPN stands for virtual private network, and essentially it allows you to access the internet through a private network somewhere else in the world. You connect to the internet through your ISP as normal, then connect to the VPN. The VPN keeps your browsing history completely private from your ISP, as it can only see that you have accessed the VPN rather than what you do while on the VPN. There is a drawback of course – while your internet search history is hidden from your ISP, it is available to the VPN provider.
5. Change your IP address
Your history is stored through the IP address that you use to make internet searches. So if you change your IP address, it’s not possible to follow your trail across visiting multiple websites. You can easily change your IP address by simply turning off your modem, leaving it for a few minutes and then turning it back on.
6. Use DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that has put an emphasis on keeping its users browsing history private. Unlike Google, which meticulously stores previous searches in order to provide personalised results to each user, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your search history at all.