Google is very good at search, and part of why is that it remembers everything you have ever asked it. If you would rather it did not, here is what actually moves the needle, ranked from quick toggles to the real fix.

What Google keeps about your searches

When you search while signed in, Google can tie the query to your account, your device, your approximate location and the things you clicked. Over time that becomes a detailed picture: your health worries, your shopping, your politics, your plans. The settings below reduce how much of that it holds onto.

The toggles inside your Google account

  1. Open My Activity and turn off Web and App Activity so searches are not saved to your account.
  2. Set auto-delete to the shortest window so anything logged is purged regularly.
  3. Turn off Location History so searches are not stamped with where you were.
  4. Open Ad Settings and switch off ad personalization.
  5. Sign out of Google in the browser you use for sensitive searches.
the catch
These settings limit what is saved to your account, but you are still searching on Google's servers, sending your query and network address to a company whose business is built on understanding you. The toggles help. They do not remove Google from the loop.

The switch that does the most

The single most effective change is to stop sending your searches to a company that profits from profiling in the first place. A search engine that has no account to attach your queries to, and stores no history, has nothing to turn off because it never collected anything.

That is the whole idea behind Bare. There is no account, no search history, and no behavioral profile. Your query passes through our server only to fetch results, so the index sees our network rather than yours, and no location signal travels with it. Nothing is saved after the page loads.

A simple setup that holds up

  1. Set a private, no-history engine as your browser's default search.
  2. Keep Google signed out, and only sign in for the Google services you actually need.
  3. Run a content blocker so destination sites cannot track the click.

You do not have to quit Google entirely to stop it from following your every search. Move the searches you care about to an engine that forgets them, and the trail mostly disappears.