You can give this a try if you want. Enable Windows Search if is it not running already and visit some of your favorite websites. Now run CCleaner or another temporary file cleaner that deletes the history file of Internet Explorer, the web browser cache and the index.dat file.

Re-open Internet Explorer and enter letters of web addresses or titles that you visited previously in the search bar. You should see History suggestions in the suggestions bar, provided that you have not changed the settings in Internet Explorer or indexing options of Windows Search.

There are actually a few options available to block this from happening in the future. Probably the easiest option is right there available in Internet Explorer.

Click on Tools (or the Tools icon in Internet Explorer 9) and select Internet Options from the menu.

Switch to the content tab there and locate the AutoComplete section in the menu.

It reads “AutoComplete stores previous entries on webpages and suggests matches for your”. Click the Settings button next to the description.

Check to see if “Use Windows Search for better results” is enabled. If it is remove the checkmark from the checkbox. This disables the feature so that no history information of Internet Explorer are stored by Windows Search. Click the Delete AutoComplete history button on your way out if you like to remove all existing entries.

Disabling the option is the easiest way to break the connection between Internet Explorer and Windows Search. Users who do not use Windows Search at all can disable the search service instead which disables the feature automatically as a consequence.

But the Internet history has also raised privacy concerns as it can be used to trace a user’s activities on the Internet. It is possible to change the history settings in Internet Explorer and delete the history right away.

The portable program IE History Monitor offers an alternative to that by displaying the complete Internet Explorer history in its interface.

The monitor does not only display urls that have been directly opened in Internet Explorer but also those that have been opened in third party tools that make use of the Internet Explorer engine to display contents.

Each entry is displayed with its title, url and dates it has been last visited and updated. Protocols like http, https and ftp are color coded to make identification easier.

Rows can be selected and deleted right away by pressing the Delete key after selecting them.

The program has also an option to clean up specific items. It is for instance possible to delete history entries that have a specific protocol, contain a specified text or are local links to a hard drive.

IE History Monitor can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website. The portable program is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows.

Historian is a free portable software program that can process the browsing history of several popular web browsers and export the information into csv or text format. Supported browsers are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox 2 and 3, Google Chrome and Opera. This includes information about bookmarks, the browsing history, downloads, cookies and cache information.

The usability of the software program is not optimal. One has to drag and drop the files that are storing the information from the web browser’s directories into the interface to process them. This can obviously only be done if the user knows the location and names of those files. It is likely that only a minority knows that Firefox is storing its bookmarks in a file called places.sqlite or that Opera is storing information about file downloads in download.dat.

The only other limitation is that the only files of the same type can be analyzed at the same time. There is practically no way of adding all browsing history files of various installed web browsers in one go to the application because of their different formats. The workaround would be to create the csv files (or text) for each source file and copy paste the information into one big csv file in the end.

It would be a great improvement if the software developer would add an automatic scan of the system to the software program. It would also be nice if different files could be queued in the application so that they could be processed together.

Historian on the other hand is a versatile portable program that can identify the browsing history of all popular web browsers with the exception of Safari.