Sickles Insight

Do you have a Google email address? Chances are that if you do, when you signed up - you left a box checked that enabled your search history to be memorized by the Googlemeisters. Infact, I think that if you had an account from early on - you were probably automatically inducted into this feature. I don’t remember seeing this box when I first joined Google in the early crazy days of auctioning off email addresses on the internet just to be cool. My housemate at the time bought his on eBay, but I patiently waited my turn which quickly arrived - I think I have to thank Becky Blackmon for that one. Anyway..back on topic - one random day several months ago I mistakenly came across my personal search history on Google search engines. STRANGE was the first and only thought that came to my mind in the first seconds of finding these statistics.

To date (I’m not told when tracking began) I’ve completed 6,550 searches according to Google - at least that’s the ones that they can track on my computer(s). The searches are very cleanly arranged by date so that you can conveniently backtrack your steps to find that page that you just couldn’t remember! Also of interest are trends specific to you and your seaches including top queries within google, top visited sites, top clicks, monthly search activity, daily search activity, and even down to hourly search activity! These trends are actually quite interesting to take a look at - especially if you didn’t know that your statistics were being trended for you. This isn’t really a new feature, infact - it’s been around since the earlier parts of 2005. I’ve just recently discovered that not many people are aware of this feature.

The most visible aspect of this toolset is the recently added information attached to searches indicating how along ago you visited a particular page. Have you noticed this gray text near to the links of your returned searches? This goes hand in hand with the history that google keeps on you. A computer is without doubt associated to you once you log in to any one of the numerous Google services. From there they can presume that you are conducting the searches until someone else might log in.

Some good reasons to use this service:

View and manage your past searches
Browse and search over your past searches, including the web pages, images, news headlines, and Froogle results you’ve clicked on. You can remove items from your Search History at any time.

Get search results and recommendations relevant to you
Get more relevant results and recommendations you may find useful based on your search history. You can also see interesting patterns about your search activity over time with the Trends feature.

Create bookmarks you can access anywhere
Bookmark your favorite websites and add labels and notes to them. Your labels and notes are searchable later, and you can access your bookmarks from any computer by signing in.

This is all part of Google’s personal search and should only happen if you’re logged into your Google account. It’s an attempt to provide even more relevant account based on previous searches and clicks. To determine if you’re logged into your google account: go to http://google.com and look at the top right corner. It will show a login link if you’re logged out or your email address if you’re logged in. If you haven’t heard of any of this, and now you are curious -

You can view search history from your account here:
www.google.com/psearch

If you are really worried about the history tracking, you can stop or pause the history for a period of time within the settings found on that page. And if you must, you can delete your history. I’m not sure what ‘delete’ actually means - but if it makes you feel better, go for it!

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