How to share a Google search link without the tracking
A copied Google search URL carries sca_esv, ei, ved, rlz and more alongside your query. Keep q=, drop the rest — on iPhone in one tap, or by hand.
Ken Tominaga · Updated 2026-10-01
Sending someone a search is a normal thing to do: “here, these results”. But a search has no clean address of its own, so what you copy is the address bar, and Google's address bar carries a long session tail.
That tail is not needed by whoever opens the link. It is a record of your side of the search: the time it ran (ei), the token Google will not explain (sca_esv), which link you clicked (ved), what you had typed before picking a suggestion (oq), and — from Chrome — how your browser was installed (rlz).
Use the LinkClean share-sheet action
On the results page, tap Share and choose Clean URL. The cleaned search link is on your clipboard: the query, plus the result-type and language settings if you had any.
Or paste into the app to see what was there
Open LinkClean and paste the results URL. Each removed parameter is listed, so you can see how much of the address was session tail. Copy the result.
Check that the filters you wanted survived
If you were on News, Images or the Web-only view, the cleaned link keeps tbm= or udm= and opens on the same tab. A date range or other tool setting lives in tbs=, which is also kept.
Manual fallback
In the address bar, keep everything up to the end of q=your+query and delete from the next & onward. Reload to confirm the same results appear. If you needed a filter, add it back: &tbm=nws for News, &udm=14 for Web-only.
Why not delete the whole query string, as you would on most links? Because here the query string is the page. A cleaner that strips everything after the ? turns a search link into Google's home page. LinkClean's rules for Google are a list of the session keys to remove, scoped to Google's search domains, so q= is never at risk.
The same scoping is why these rules do nothing on other sites. ei and oq are short enough to be ordinary parameters elsewhere, and elsewhere they are left alone.
Skip the steps — LinkClean does it.
LinkClean strips tracking parameters from any link in one tap, from any app's share sheet. No account, on-device.
