"If you’ve enabled search history in your account (tap ‘Settings’ and select ‘Save Searches’ under ‘Search History’, then tap ‘Save’), the history that you see is a combination of all your searches done while you are signed-in, whether you are searching from a laptop at home, your desktop computer at work, or your phone while on-the-go," Google’s Mobile Team explains. "Your mobile searches are marked with a little phone icon so you can tell them apart. For websites you’ve visited while searching on a desktop or laptop, you’ll see screenshot thumbnails that can help you recognize and return to the right sites quickly."

"If you want to remove any history items, you can tap the ‘Edit’ button at the top of the page and delete individual search queries," the team adds. "If you prefer to stop recording search history all together, choose the ‘Do not save searches’ option under "Settings" on the home screen and tap ‘Save.’"

You will be presented with tabs for "history" and "starred", so you can easily access either one. There is more info about the feature available here.

"You are in full control of your query history," the Bing Team stresses.  "We know your privacy is very important to you.  You can turn History on or off at any time or selectively remove any portion of your search history using the Manage History option.  You will see both of these choices every time you use Autosuggest."

"Many search tasks span multiple search sessions even days or weeks," Bing says. "In fact, 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week!  Perhaps you need to research the purchase of a new automobile.  You might use Bing to find a retail location and to further research online – over many days – to make the best decisions on your big ticket purchase.  With history support in Autosuggest, you can restart a previous search session by typing a few characters to see your previous queries and start researching right where you left off.  We know from our testing that this makes you more effective at your longer search tasks."

The suggestions that are based on your search history are listed in purple, to stand out from the other blue suggestions.

Basically what this means is that Google is using user’s search history to determine what ads to show on sites using AdSense. If a user arrives at one AdSense site via a search results page, and then goes to another AdSense site within a few hours, they might see ads based on the referral data from the first one.

"The technical way that we’re doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user’s browser," says AdSense Associate Product Manager Rebecca Illowsky. "After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here."

"This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours," she adds. "Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams’ continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website."

Some people claim to have already seen a rise in clickthrough rate since Google made these changes. Commenting on Google’s explanation, one reader says, "I saw a rise in CTR and was wondering [if] something was cooking so I guess this was it."

Have you seen a rise in AdSense CTR recently? Let us know.

Kamireddy explains that Bing Offers the following:

- Off/On switch:  With one click, you can choose to turn history on or off directly on the search results page or, if you’re returning, on the homepage. About to perform a search that you don’t want to remember as part of your history? Just click Turn off and new searches are no longer remembered.  Want to get back to building your search history? You can just as easily turn it back on. Your on/off state will be maintained indefinitely, as long as you don’t clear your browser cookies.

- Control: Too many systems provide us with choice, but little control.  We’ve created Bing Search history with multiple layers of control.  You can remove your entire search history right on the search results page or on the homepage (just click Clear all). For finer-grained control, you can delete individual queries or sites from your history by clicking See all and then removing individual items from your history. You can also clear your entire search history directly from that page. Once you delete an item, it’s gone – it won’t appear in search history again.

Search History on Bing is available for four weeks at this point. Removing history removes it from the actual service and prevents the history from being displayed on the site, but it doesn’t actually delete the info from Microsoft’s search logs.

The search logs are retained and anonymized as described in the Bing Supplement to the Microsoft Online Privacy Statement. Bing stores searches users make separately from any account information that directly identifies them, such as email address, phone number, etc.
 

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Google’s Persistence Of Memory

The mechanisms behind Google’s operations seem surreal to people who have been on the Web since Tim Berners-Lee turned it loose over a decade ago. A short time after it debuted and people started launching websites all over the world, the need for a quality search product became apparent.

Whether one likes it these days or not, Google became that product. Their ubiquity has become a lightning rod for controversy, be it on censorship in China, or privacy issues at home. One of the company’s legal heavy hitters, Peter Fleischer, wrote about Google and search history, and why they remember searches:

Three factors were critical. One was maintaining our ability to continue to improve the quality of our search services. Another was to protect our systems and our users from fraud and abuse. The third was complying

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