Partial Seach History

[Bob Lenahan]

Can't find this answer, but Windows 7, I go to Google Search, type in a letter or 2, and get a nuymber of possibilities, including past searches. I'd like to eliminate thaty "service" How do I do it?
And, thanks in advaNCE.
bOB.

[Bob Lenahan]

Well, yeah, okay, I'm busted!
Anyhow, I see it as what you're sasying will clean out the "history", but I'm talking about something different. Using the google search engine, I type in a web site or a subject- for example "pprune". But later, starting with the google page, when I type in "p" I get a number of different options starting with the letter "p". I can't find a way to eliminate that. How do I eliminate that?
Bob.

[Geordie_Expat]

Why do you want to ? Just keep typing till it shows the site you want.


I find the feature you want to switch off most helpful as it saves typing in the whole name.


Or am I missing something here ?

[VP959]

Pretty much every browser has an option or setting to turn off the "remember search history" function and also another tick box to "clear search history". I use Firefox, and that has several options for remembering your search history. I have mine set to clear the search history every time I close the browser, which not only means that potentially embarrassing old searches don't come up when you least expect them, but that you still retain a history of all searches in that session, which can be handy if you want to go back and check.

Auto-suggest is a search engine function usually. I use Startpage as a search engine most of the time now (still uses the Google search engine, I think) and have that set to not suggest search terms. The latter is a bit like Marmite, some love it, others loath it. My wife loves search suggestions, I loathe it, almost always because I use a lot of Boolean and site-specific, or region-specific, searches, and the suggestions are just a nuisance under those circumstances

For example, it doesn't know that I may be looking for a specific post on this forum, so will not know that I'm going to add the modifier "site: pprune.org" (space added after the colon to avoid the accidental smiley.....) at the end of the search term to only search within the pprune forum, so it will suggest loads of garbage whilst I'm typing.

I have a feeling that with Google you may now need to be logged in to a Google account in order to personalise the settings (I could be wrong here, it's years since I've used it). With Startpage and DuckDuckGo they have options to store your personalised settings either locally or in the cloud (I don't trust the latter). Most of the time I use Startpage and have my personalisation settings saved as a custom URL for the search engine, stored as a bookmark, as that seems the easiest way to do it, and also means that if I ever use Firefox sync it will ensure the same search engine options are saved on all the devices I have that run Firefox, which is useful.

[Bob Lenahan]

I'll check tose out- thanks.
Bob