root/google/www.google.com/psearch/privacyfaq.html

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# 
 ** Personalized Search Help (Beta)**

[Personalized Search](/)  
  
[Search History](/searchhistory)  
  
[Help](help.html)  
  
[Privacy Policy](privacy.html)  
  
**Privacy FAQ**

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**Privacy FAQ for Personalized Search**

  1. [What information must I provide to sign up for Personalized Search?](#info)
  2. [What information do you collect when I use Personalized Search?](#collect)
  3. [How do you use the information you collect when I use Personalized Search?](#share)
  4. [What happens when I pause the service, remove items, or delete the Personalized Search service?](#edit)

**1. What information must I provide to sign up for Personalized Search?**

To use Personalized Search, you'll need to register for a [Google Account](http://www.google.com/accounts). At that time, we'll ask you for some limited personal information, including your email address and a password which we'll keep on our system in an encrypted form. We require this log-in information in order to protect your Google Account and your search history from unauthorized access. 

**2. What information do you collect when I use Personalized Search?**

In order to provide the service, Personalized Search saves information about your activity on Google including your search queries, the results you click on, and the date and time of your searches. Over time, the service may use additional information about your activity on Google or other information you provide us in order to deliver better search results. This Privacy Policy will be updated to inform you of any substantive changes to the service. Also, as stated in the main [Google Privacy Policy](/privacy.html), when you use any Google service, we collect additional information including your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. 

**3. How do you use the information you collect when I use Personalized Search?**

Personalized Search uses the information from your search history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search results. Personalized Search algorithms use the information to improve your Google search results by boosting results that are more relevant to you. In addition to enabling the Personalized Search functionality, the information we collect when you use Personalized Search may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services. We will not disclose this information to other companies or individuals, except in the limited circumstances described in our main [Google Privacy Policy](/privacy.html), or with your consent. 

**4. What happens when I pause the service, remove items, or delete the Personalized Search service?**

You can choose to stop storing your searches in Personalized Search either temporarily or permanently, or remove items, as described in [Personalized Search Help](help.html). If you remove items, they will be removed from the service and will not be used to improve your search results. As is common practice in the industry, Google also maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users. For example, we use this information to audit our ads systems, understand which features are most popular to users, improve the quality of our search results, and help us combat vulnerabilities such as denial of service attacks. 

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