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,
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