Turn Off your Google Search Suggested Results in a Few Easy Steps

Being logged in with your Google Account while surfing the Internet can make things easier for you. When using your personal account, you get a “customized” experience, since many features are going to be modelled after your online activity: for example, you can bookmark your favorite webpages, get personalized ads when visiting a website, have YouTube videos recommended to you that are pertinent to your watch history, etc.

Another feature you’ll find when using Google Search – Google’s search engine – is Personal results. Linked to your search history, this feature refers to when Google autofills the rest of the term or sentence you’re currently typing in the search bar. Here’s an example: if you’ve been visiting a certain website very often, such as Instagram, whenever you want to enter its name in the search bar you’ll get an autocomplete prediction from Google Search after only typing the letter “I”.

So, Google’s autocomplete predictions and recommendations can save you some time. But, sometimes, you may want to turn them off, especially when multiple people use the same device as you and they can easily access your Google Account. You might have been in the awkward situation in which your friends or family took your phone without your permission and started using Google Search, leading to them finding out about your questionable or hilarious search engine predictions (it happened to me way too many times).

Therefore, if you want to keep your Google Search recommendations a secret, this is the article for you: we’ll find out about how to turn off Google Search personal results!

How to turn off Personal results

As I mentioned, having Personal results turned on means that you’ll get personalized predictions and recommendations in Google Search. Deactivating this feature in your Google Account is super easy:

– sign into your Google Account

– go to this page

– then turn off Show personal results

Note: if you have Web & App Activity on, your Search history is saved in your Google Account and used to give you more personalized experiences in other Google services.

How to turn off related searches

Even though you logged out of your Google Account, your (or someone else’s) recent Google search results will be visible on a given device anyway. But don’t worry, because you can get rid of these recommendations related to your recent search by turning off the Search customization feature: