Managing your privacy online #6 – Chrome tracks the search engines you use

Did you know that Google Chrome keeps track of every time you run a search on a website? I didn’t, ’till I stumbled on the list of webpages when I was looking at my default search engine, and saw a massive list of websites at the bottom of the page.

I did a quick (!) count and Chrome had saved a list of 110 websites I’d done searches on.

Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines

See the section called ‘Other search engines’? It’s a list of every website you’ve done a search on in Google Chrome. If you’re not comfortable with this list, you can easily remove it – you can either delete web pages one by one, or use a script – go to https://superuser.com/questions/1141135/google-chrome-remove-all-other-search-engines#1154955 and follow the instructions. It works!