When you talk about search history, most people are looking for a way to clear their search history or delete their search history, right? Whatever the reason for hiding their search history, the discerning person reading this post will be able to VIEW recent search history for all browsers on any computer with a simple and free program.
Typically, when you search Google, Yahoo, MSN, or certain sites like Facebook or Twitter, the browser caches this search history on your local computer in temporary files. Unless you manually delete your search history, someone can easily come in and view all of your previous searches.
Now in IE, Chrome and Firefox, you can open the sidebar or History tab and view the last visited sites, but opening each browser individually to view your search history will be a tedious process. Plus, you still won’t be able to see search results on social sites.
If you want to quickly see all the most recent searches done on your computer, no matter which search engine or which browser you used, try the cool MyLastSearch program.
MyLastSearch is a tiny 47KB program that doesn’t even need to be installed to use. It’s just an .EXE file that you can run from a portable USB drive if you like! This means you can take it with you and quickly connect it to any computer and see the last searches performed! It’s a bad program if it falls into the wrong hands!
I ran the program on my computer and immediately got a bunch of search results! It breaks it down into a table with the search text, search engine, search type, search time, and the web browser in which the search was performed.
It seems to work for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and Alexa. You will have to try other search engines to make sure they work, but most people will try one of them first. In my tests, everything worked as indicated, but I could not see the results of the searches I was doing on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This could be due to the fact that I was not logged into any of the services, but I think it should work without this requirement.
Of course, if you delete the cache and history files from your browser, MyLastSearch won’t be able to find anything. So if you want to be safe and not let this program read your search history, you can read the article I linked above on deleting your search history. Basically, you can clear your local browsing history and you should be fine. In Firefox, you need to go to Tools (three horizontal bars), then to Options, then click on Privacy, and finally click on the Clear Recent History link.
You can also click the dropdown next to Firefox. will be and select “Never remember history” so as not to worry about clearing history manually. In IE, click the Settings gear icon and select Internet Options. On the General tab, click the Delete button in the Browsing History section. You can also check Delete browsing history on exit so that your browsing history is never saved in IE.
Finally, in Chrome, you click the settings icon (three bars again) and then click History. Finally, click on “Clear browsing data” and then choose which part of the history you want to delete. Chrome is the only browser that doesn’t have the option of not writing history or clearing your browsing history on exit. Instead, you must rely on third party extensions. Click Click & Clean
MyLastSearch is a quick and easy way to view your search history on a Windows computer, and overall it does a very good job. It is worth noting that before starting the program you must log out and, if possible, log back in. Some browsers do not write all data to the local cache until a few minutes after they close or until the user logs out of Windows, so you might not see all searches until you log out. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
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