I’ve turned search engine suggestions off because they often get me side-tracked, or even get me to completely forget what I actually wanted. If it is something I have visited once already, simply getting that from my history skips the search engine, making the process slightly faster. I realize that my attention problem might not actually be solved by this,
Sounds like as your history grows it gets harder to sort through. I dont want to suggest bookmarks because I feel like I always do, but…
I rarely actually press Ctrl+Shift+H to go through the chronological history, and I do actually use bookmarks, (you know favelets? I have 2 that are actually useful). It technically also gets harder to search for the thing I want in my History as It gets bigger, but its still feels like less typing than on a search engine.
I never delete my browsing history, but then, my home drive is encrypted and my screen lock is pretty short - and I usually trigger it by throwing my mouse to the top-left corner which immediately activates the screen lock. If someone is skilled and dedicated enough to get past all of that, I’m probably compromised in a half dozen other ways anyway.
I have been contemplating having every site I visit automatically indexed by buku, and using that as my primary search engine, with a fall-back to Ecosia. Like you, my search history is a better source of 60/70% of my search needs.
have not thought about this security aspect yet, I seldom do actually take the laptop to a public place