You can now delete last 15 minutes of Google history on Android with one tap

Listen, there is no judgement. We don’t need to know about those search results you want to wipe off the face of the earth. It’s no one’s business that you searched ‘how to clone your partner’s WhatsApp.’ Or that you went into the weeds after that search, looking into prenups, breach of promise to marry and other related issues. 

Google realises you may not want a record of that activity. You may want just a kill switch to wipe your online record for a period of time. Google has always provided three options to auto-delete Google Web Activity and App Activity; three months, 18 months and 36 months. 

In cases like yours above, you probably can’t have those damning search results sitting there for 3 months. You are forced to manually go through the history and remove the offensive entries. Google saw that that was not ideal. You need to fiddle around with settings to remove a few entries.

You have been able to remove just the day’s history too for a while now. However, this forces you to remove even some of those results from hours earlier that you may still want. To make it worse, if your person is the kind that would check your search history, seeing a wiped slate would probably present its own problems.

So, Google has introduced the ‘Delete last 15 minutes’ button. With that one tap it is as if the last 15 minutes never happened. Of course, we can never know if Google actually removes that data but we know that neither you nor anyone else will ever be able to see it again.

How to delete the last 15 minutes of your life

• Go to Google app
• Tap on profile picture
• Tap on ‘Search History’
• Tap on ‘delete’ and 
• Select ‘Last 15 minutes’

Here you can see the feature is not yet available on my device

Remember too that your Google history includes your Maps (where you went),Play (what you played) and your audio and voice recordings. Also included is your activity on apps, sites and devices that use Google service a.k.a a lot of them. That history is wiped too when you delete your Google history.

You may not find the feature just yet. Google is rolling out the feature globally and it may take a couple of weeks to reach your device. And note that we are talking about Android here, iOS has had this feature since July 2021. How Google can play its Android dirty like that is beyond me.

Have a safe search life out there. You can also read:

Google Knows So Much About You: Here’s How You Can Limit Or Delete What They Know