Google provides choice to immediately delete your final quarter-hour of search historical past

Google is launching a brand new privateness characteristic for search that allows you to immediately delete your final quarter-hour of search historical past on cell, the corporate announced on Thursday. The new choice was first revealed alongside a number of different search and Chrome enhancements at I/O 2021 and is now rolling out to everybody.

The choice to delete your final quarter-hour of search historical past is at the moment solely accessible in Google’s iOS app and is headed to Android later this 12 months. On desktop, your choices for deleting searches are restricted to setting your historical past to auto-delete each three, 18, or 36 months (18 months is the default for brand new accounts), or deleting searches by hand. You can see what the brand new choice seems like within the iOS app under:

Google says it solely tracks your search historical past to “personalize” your expertise when the “Web and App Activity” setting is enabled. Adding a strategy to immediately delete your historical past is nice in your peace of thoughts, but it surely additionally means you will get among the advantages the individuals who’ve taken the time to mess with their settings obtain, with out doing the additional work. Think of it as an emergency “oh no” button for awful, embarrassing, or simply plain non-public searches. If you’d fairly simply safe your searches from prying, non-Google eyes fairly than delete them, Google additionally gives the choice to password defend your search historical past.