Get rid of your Facebook search history (maybe)

Whenever you view someone's page on Facebook, there's a record of that visit. So, if you're in to viewing your ex's page over and over, Facebook knows this. (Your ex will not, no matter how many of the fake "Do you know who's viewing your profile?" apps he or she installs.)

The same goes for if you're searching for the Facebook page of that fantastic Mexican place you just visited. Your search history is recorded, just as it is if you use something like Google (when you are logged in to your Google account, then your searches can be linked to you as well).

On Google, you can choose not to have your search history accessible through your account (Google still holds search logs on its own servers, but they'll be deleted after 18 months). On Facebook, you have to manually delete your search history.

Until a few weeks ago, there actually wasn't any way to view your previous search history at all. But I knew that Facebook was keeping a log of it. Just typing in the first letter of a cafe I frequent, whose Facebook page I'd visited several times previously, brings it up -- even though I have never actually Liked the page.

But now, there's a way to view your old search logs -- and delete them in one big go if you so desire.

The way to do it:

• Go to your Timeline and click the Activity Log button.
• Under Posts and Apps, scroll down to Search and click it.There, you see all the searches you have made, including the time you searched.
• To clear all the searches, click Clear Searches.
• After the warning message comes up, click Clear Searches again to confirm.(If for some reason you want to keep the searches and only delete a few, you can individually click on the lock symbol on the right-hand side next to the particular search you want to delete.)

Now although your search history is now cleared, I expect that Facebook still has a record of the search log somewhere - typical search engines will for legal purposes as much as anything. (Typing the first letter of that cafe still brings them up first in my search results, even though I've deleted the log.)

This clean-up is also something you need to manually do on a regular basis as you can't turn off the search history logs. So, put a recurrent reminder in your calendar and maybe combine it with your general web browser history clean-up session.