Here’s how to remove your Facebook search history

We suspect that most Internet users out there would have, at some point, cleared their Internet browsing history.

There are plenty of good reasons to do this. It prevents any marketing software from getting an insight into your surfing habits. It protects your privacy if your computer ever gets stolen or compromised. And yes, perhaps there are websites you’d rather not let anyone know you frequented (such as that boutique website you ordered your spouse’s birthday gift from but haven’t surprised them with it yet.)

But it’s not just your Internet browser that keeps a record of your browsing history. Facebook does too. In fact it keeps a pretty detailed report of every single thing you put into Facebook’s Search Bar. Everything you search for on Facebook is kept in a list which can be retrieved by you at any time (or at least anyone with access to your account.)

As you’d expect, this list gives a pretty good insight into where you’ve been going on Facebook. Of course only you can see this list of searches, but that’s not much help if someone manages to gain control of your Facebook account, if only for a while.


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There is good news though, this list of searches can be cleared. If you don’t want to risk letting others know what (or who) you’ve been searching for on Facebook, we’d recommend deleting this largely useless record of searches.

It’s simple to do. If you’re on Facebook for desktop, just click the search bar and click EDIT on the top of the drop down box. Then select the “Clear Searches” option on the right side of the screen. Easy.

For the Facebook app its even easier. Open the Facebook app and click the Magnifying Glass icon at the top, then select See All, then Clear All.

This provides any Facebook user the ability to see everything they’ve searched for on Facebook, and allows them to remove all of these searches.

Worth noting is that once you’ve done this, it clears your search history on every device. So you don’t need to do this on all your devices. Just one. But remember, Facebook will keep recording future searches, so it’s worth doing this purge periodically if you don’t want to hand Facebook an extensive list of what (or who) you’ve been looking for.

And voila – no more record of all your Facebook searches.