Avoid bad YouTube recommendations with one tiny habit

Everyone has that one YouTube link you wish you’d never clicked on. Not because of the content, but because it changed the suggested videos YouTube served to you after.

But there’s an easy way to prevent this annoyance. Just open the link in an incognito browsing window.

You won’t be logged into your account within a private window—it’s a blank slate. What you do in the incognito window won’t affect your normal browser windows and tabs, either, so when you close the window, it’ll be as if you never accessed those sites. (From the perspective of your browser, anyway. Your internet provider can still see what you’ve visited unless you use a VPN.)

For Chrome, the fastest way to open a link in an incognito window is by right-clicking on the link, then hitting g on your keyboard or selecting “Open link in incognito window.” For Edge, Firefox, and Brave, right-click and hit p on your keyboard. If your browser doesn’t offer keyboard shortcuts in the right-click context menu, select and click on “Open link in private window.”

As for general browsing (e.g., you’re not clicking on someone else’s link but you’re hunting for content on your own), you can use Ctrl + Shift + N (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, and other Chromium browsers) or Ctrl + Shift + P (Firefox) to quickly open a new incognito or private window. Alternatively, you can right-click on your browser’s logo in the Windows taskbar and select the option to open a private window. As a reminder, your history won’t save. If you need to later refer to your research, you must manually save the links, or use a secondary profile or account.

This method may sound unnecessarily complicated, but once it becomes habit, you’ll spend less effort than continually going into your YouTube history and deleting irrelevant videos from your history. It also works well for other platforms or websites where manual curation isn’t available (like looking at apartment listings on real estate sites), where retraining the algorithm takes time and work.

Looking for more browsing tips? Check out the top 10 Chrome keyboard shortcuts you should know and the 5 Chrome extensions we can’t live without. Chrome and Edge’s tab groups are incredibly handy tools, too.