Saving your Facebook search history is supposed to help you by making it easier for you to find what you’re looking for, but it’s also a way to gather as much information about you as possible and sell it to advertisers.

Facebook is great for interacting with your friends and family, but it’s also creating a database in the background of anything you search for on their site. If you want to limit the information Facebook is storing about you, or just remove irrelevant or unwanted search items, you can delete your search history on Facebook.

To begin, go to the Facebook site, log in to your account, and go to your Home page. Click the down arrow in the upper-right corner of the page and select “Activity Log” from the drop-down menu.

A list of options displays on the left side of the Activity Log screen. Click “More” under “Comments” to expand the list.

Click “Search” in the expanded list.

A list of all your searches is displayed by date. To delete one search item, click the block icon to the right of the item and select “Delete” from the drop-down menu.

The “Remove Search” dialog box displays making sure you want to remove the search. Click “Remove Search” to complete the removal process.

To clear all of your search history, click the “Clear Searches” link at the top of the page.

A confirmation dialog box displays for this action, as well, reminding you that your search history helps them show you better results when you search. What they don’t say is that it also helps them collect information about you. If you would rather not provide them that information, click “Clear Searches” to remove you entire search history.

To limit the information Facebook collects about you, perform this easy procedure often to clear your searches. You can also protect your privacy online by starting your browser in private browsing mode. If you use Chrome, you can make it easy to open the browser in Incognito mode from a shortcut.

We also showed you how to clear your Google search history.