I’ve been shopping for a birthday present for my husband and am concerned that he might go to Amazon.com and find out because of the “your recent searches” area. Is there some way to edit the information, delete things or even just turn this off when on Amazon.com?

Dave’s Answer:

Nice job. Many people who shop online forget that modern sites like Amazon.com not only keep track of what you buy but in what you look at too. I know this first-hand because if I look for a gift for someone or, worse, I buy something for one of my kids, suddenly I’m inundated with recommendations of similar products even though I don’t actually have any interest in those additional products. This is worse if two of you share an account, as it sounds like you might do: if your spouse is into NASCAR and you’re into quilting, well, you can see where those recent searches can be pretty far off base.

Fortunately, Amazon must have received a fair amount of feedback about this feature so they not only let you disable it, but they let you remove specific entries from the recent search list on a case-by-case basis too.

To modify it, you need to go to the Amazon.com site and log in with your account credentials. Probably that latter step is unnecessary and when you look on the top left it says something like:

What you want is on the top right, actually:

Click on “Your Account” and you’ll see a vast number of options. Scroll down to find the “Personalization” section:

Click on “View and edit your browsing history”, as you can see I’ve already done (which is why my text link is brown, not blue):

As you can see, it shows a list of your recently viewed items. Here you can see the Mac Mini I’d been checking out. To the right is the key element, the “Delete this item” link. Find the gift possibilities you’d been examining and delete them here and your spouse will never know what you were doing on Amazon.com!

If you’d rather just disable the feature forever, back on the Personalization section there’s another link “Your Browsing History Settings”. Click on it and you’ll go to another page with a big yellow button:

Click on that and you’ll never have to worry about Amazon.com tracking this information. Helpful, eh?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 11:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Dave Taylor is known as an expert on both business and technology issues. Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four startups, he also runs a marketing company and consults with firms seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs. AskDaveTaylor.com http://www.intuitive.com/blog/