How to See Your Website Viewing History

There are literally hundreds of reasons you could ever want to look at your website viewing history, along with many reasons why you would not want others to see your online history as well. These could range from wanting to find personal data to hiding business decisions from prying eyes - any of which are more than good enough reasons to understand how your computer tracks your online history

Its important to understand a few basic scenarios in which you may want to know what your web viewer history has to show you.

Reasons to look at Internet History:

• Child safety.
  - What is your child up to? Checking browser history can be an easy way to either set your heart at ease or warn you about possible dangers.
• Lost data.
  - You were researching for hours online and the worst happened: a power outage. All those pages are lost! Guess again. Your computer has a list of everything you have ever looked at (unless you deleted it).

It is important to understand that people can easily see what you do, and why you need to watch that.

Reasons to delete some Internet Histories:

• Business Privacy
  - Business secrets can be pretty valuable. On top of a safe internet connection you should clean your computer after looking at secure or personal websites.
• Business Privacy - Personal Use
  - If you are using your business computer for personal things, it might be good to delete your history so you aren't fired or so nothing shows up if your computer is searched through: IE, Facebook history, youtube videos, and other non work related stuff.
• Personal Privacy - Everywhere
  - Buying gifts online? That person can look at your computer history and see what you bought. Planning anything as a surprise online means you should be clearing your history.

Internet history viewing is extremely simple. On almost all computers it is Ctrl+H in the browser screen. If that does not work, simply look at your browser file menu and you should easily spot a button for it. In the main history interface found this way, you can usually find ways of sorting your internet history by website, time seen, how many times it has been viewed, and many more.

Removing internet history is simple as well, and will help not only with privacy but clears out old data from your computer. Most drop down menus have a "delete recent history" button now, but if you go into the history interface from the drop down menu, it will list all the sites you have seen and you can delete them manually, or press Ctrl+A to select them all and delete them that way.

CCleaner is one of the best ways to clean your computer and keep it running smoothly. This program has a modifiable list so you can control what it looks at deleting, but they are mainly files that just clog up the computer such as search history and other little files.I try to run it every week or two because it cleans up a lot of data I don't use, and works to solve registry problems for me.

CCleaner can be found here! I highly recommend it!

It is also good to note that many browsers have an "incognito" function that does not track anything a browser usually would, so it is a safe browsing method that will not track your history or input.

I hope you found out something new today, and will think about your computer security and the ways your website viewing history can help or hinder you.