How to view recent search history for IE and Firefox browsers

Posted on December 20, 2007 at 6:33 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Search History & Privacy series!

  1. How to view recent search history for IE and Firefox browsers
  2. 13 ways to protect personal data from online fraud and identity theft
  3. How to clear your Google search history

When you talk about search history, most people are looking for a way to clear their search history or delete their search history, right? Well they are trying to hide it from someone and if they are not careful, an astute person reading this post will be able to VIEW the recent search history of any computer using a simple and free program.

Basically, when you perform searches in Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine, the browser caches that search history onto the local computer in temp files. If you do not manually delete the search history, someone can easily come along and view all of your previous searches.

Now in IE and Firefox, you can open up the History sidebar and view the most recently visited sites, but it’s not so easy to see the all of the searches performed at various search sites. For example, if you go to Google.com, sometimes a drop down will appear with the latest searches performed and sometimes it won’t! An even so, that doesn’t stop someone from going to Yahoo and searching there.

If you want to quickly view all of the most recent searches performed on a computer no matter which search engine they used, check out a cool program called MyLastSearch.

MyLastSearch is a tiny 47KB program that doesn’t even require you to install it in order to use. It’s simply an .EXE file that can be run from a portable USB drive if you like! That means you can take it around and quickly connect it up to any computer and see the recent searches performed! This is a bad program if it gets into the wrong hands!

mylastsearch

I ran the program on my computer and instantly got 177 search results back! It breaks it down into a table with Search Text, Search Engine, Search Type, Search Time, and which web browser the search was performed on.

It seems to work on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and Alexa. You’ll have to try other search engines to see if it works on those, but most people are going to try one of those first.

Of course, if you delete the cache and history files from your browser, MyLastSearch will not be able to find anything, so if you want to be safe and not have your search history readable by this program, you can read the above article that I wrote titled “delete the search history”. In Firefox, you need to go to Tools, then Options, then click on Privacy and finally click on Clear Now.

clear search history

You can also check the Always clear my private data when I close Firefox option to make sure it’s deleted after each browsing session. Enjoy! Source FreewareGenius

[tags]view search history, recent searches, recent browser searches, clear search history, mylastsearch[/tags]

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

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Comments

4 Responses to “How to view recent search history for IE and Firefox browsers”

  1. mary hamilton said on : April 13th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

    how to see all my past search history.
    last month i went to a site and it is very important that i go back to this site but i forgot the name of it.
    please help


  2. mary hamilton said on : April 13th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    help me


  3. Richard said on : December 4th, 2009 at 2:14 pm

    Press CTRL H! That’s way faster! ;)


  4. Vanessa said on : December 9th, 2009 at 7:40 pm

    Does this program work with other browsers like Google Chrome, Safari or Opera? Also, if it records the search and then someone deletes their search history from the browser, the program will still have the searches right?


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