How to Delete Search History ?

How to Delete Search History

One way in which you can protect your privacy on the Internet, is by knowing the procedure for deletion of search history. In this article, I discuss how to delete search history on most of the popular browsers, that are used by people all over the world.

All web browsers have a facility for recording everything that is searched and they keep track of information keyed in by you. While this feature is designed to make your web browsing experience smoother, faster and hassle free, it has a huge downside to it. Critical information like your passwords, login names and other information entered in web forms and applets, gets stored on the browser automatically. Hackers can profit from this information trail that you leave on the Internet. That's why, it's prudent to learn how to go about deleting web browsing history on whichever browser you are using. With web browsing history deleted from browsers, you can rest easy about being vulnerable to hacker attacks.

Removing Search History From Browsers

Developers of all the major web browsers have realized the importance of having a facility for search history clearance in the web browsers to protect privacy of individual users. Every one of the popular web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome have features for web history clearance. This simple action goes a long way in providing Internet security, while also freeing hard disk space on your computer.

Mozilla Firefox
Firefox is the most popular browser used online, which shares the greatest volume of web traffic. Let us see how to remove search history on computers using the 'Mozilla Firefox 3.6', which has been released recently. Here's how Firefox history deletion works.

Click on the 'Tools' tab in Firefox and select the 'Clear Recent History' option.
A window will open in which you must select the 'Everything' option to clear all searched history up till that moment. Then click on 'Clear now' and all history will get wiped out.

Firefox offers an option of 'Start private Browsing' under the tools tab. If you select that option, the search history storage facility is turned off and your history is not saved for that session.

Google Chrome
Google has forayed in to developing its own web browser - Google Chrome, launched recently, which is one of the fastest browsers on the web. Here are simple instructions on deleting web browsing history from Google Chrome.

To delete search history from Google chrome, type the key combination 'Ctrl + Shift + Del'.
In the window that opens, click on the 'Clear Browsing Data' button to delete all search history.

Internet Explorer 8
Microsoft's powerful web browser is also very popular among net users. Here are instructions you are looking for.

Click on the 'Safety' tab in Internet Explorer 8 and select 'Delete Recent History'.
A window will open with options detailing the search items you want to delete.
Select the items you want to get rid of and click on delete. All the search history items will be deleted.

Even IE 8 offers a feature of private browsing under the safety tab, which lets you switch off search history saving feature.

Opera
To get rid of your past web browsing data on Opera, do the following

Click on the 'Tools' tab and select the 'Delete Private Data'.
A window will open in which you click on the 'Delete' button to get rid of search history.

Hope this article has given you a clear idea of how history may be cleared on all browsers. All the job takes is three or four mouse clicks!