If you forgot to turn on Incognito Mode in Google Chrome before searching the web, don’t worry, Google now has an easy solution. For those who don’t know, incognito mode is Chrome’s built-in privacy-conscious browser mode. While your activity is not hidden from your ISP (or the websites you visit), your activity will not be shown in the web history or in Google Predictive Search.
Until now, there has been no way to remove your searches from Google’s stored browsing history unless you specifically enabled Incognito Mode. While you can delete individual websites from the web history stored in Chrome, future searches on Google.de will still show a helpful (or in this case not helpful) reminder of a previous search.
For example, while it has long been possible to remove Engagementrings.com from your history on Chrome, the next person the family has used might type in “engagement” only to be prompted which they previously searched for using Google. Engagement rings’.
The Californian company announced during its annual developer conference, known as Google IO, that it will now include a quick shortcut for clearing the last 15 minutes of queries using its search engine.
So, if all of a sudden you find yourself looking for birthday gifts without having incognito mode turned on, you can go to the main Google.com page, click your profile icon in the top right corner and select Manage Your Google Account. Then click on “Clear History” in the menu. Simple.
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Google says it put this new feature front and center because it believes it will be hugely popular with fans. This suggests that forgetful Google users have asked the company to implement it for some time.
Either way, it’s nice that you don’t have to look up or think about a career move on a work computer every time you buy a gift, we’re pretty sure that these are the only two things incognito mode is ever used for.
There’s a catch … functionality is limited to the last fifteen minutes. In addition, you need to deal with the consequences of your recorded searches.
Privacy was a big focus of Google IO’s opening speech, which was abandoned last year due to the coronavirus pandemic but is only streaming online this year. In addition to the ability to clear search history with a single click, Google added a private folder to its Google Photos app. Snapshots and videos in this folder are hidden in the main view of the app. You can also lock them behind a fingerprint or face scan, which comes in handy.
