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Google Adds Search History Feature
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google has released My Search History (Beta). Login with your Google account (like your Gmail account), and a search history feature will be integrated right into the Google.com homepage. You can then retrieve pages you've previously found by either clicking on calendar dates, or by performing a full-text search. Other features are available as well."
Here comes the paranoia that google is tracking EVERYONEs searches..just hiding the fact from those who don't sign up for this.
- nick
Yahoo is apparently rolling out a similar type service soon...don't see much use in looking up old searches frankly. Its probably more useful for these firms to collect data for advertisers than it is for aiding in my future data retrieval.
Ok, privacy concerns aside, that's a pretty spiffy thing to have. I've wracked my brain for old searches and old sites for technical data, bits of code, and so on and came up short a lot of the time. (who hasn't surfed to Google, typed in one letter and scrolled down the list looking for something you've typed in before?)
Hell, i've written my own browser cache downloader for Safari and Mozilla (with snazzy search engine and all the trimmings) just to keep all the places i've been to current. Remembering all the places i've been to using Google helps a lot.
Keep it lean and popup free, Google, and I will use it every day.
The last thing I want, is a subpoenable search history. I search for a lot of things. I honestly do not want to be accountable for the things that I might search for, whether I get results of not.
If you don't want to be tracked on the Internet, there's a simple solution: don't have a static IP address and turn off cookies.
With that said, if you think this feature is a privacy issue, you should probably have your web browser history and cache disabled. I can't wait for a virus that emails the victim's history and cache to everyone in their address book. Hilarity would definitely ensue.
"Don't panic"
"They are upfront...read their privacy policy"
"They have been logging all searches for ages therefore it's ok"
Listen. Most people don't read privacy policies, so remain blissfully unaware but what they are doing when they use Google. Most people don't even think about cookies, many more don't even know or care what they are. You could argue therefore that by inference they don't value or care about their own privacy. Well, hell maybe they don't. But actually that argument alone is not good enough.
Some of us have been passionately arguing that Google is a just kind of global Carnivore type project or at least with excellent potential to be one. No one knows really what Google actually do with the data they collect; how they link it together to form individual portfolios or how they treat it, manage it, or store it. No one knows how many times they have been asked by government agencies to supply information about their users and no one knows about the integrity of Google's employees, apart from romantic fluff generated by their most avid fans.
On another note Slashdot's obsession with Google is really quite unhealthy, and concerning, and I for one have submitted several Google critical stories here only for them to be rejected, but immediately a pro Google story will appear, giving an extraordinarily one-sided view about Google. If you only read Slashdot, you would think Google are something from heaven, but if you read other sites and news sources you will know that is simply not true.
And ok that is a seperate subject, but I just wonder what this site gets out of making a news item of every single thing Google do, and yet rarely or never a critical story on Google appears. It's actually quite creepy and very noticable.
While the privacy issues were the first thing on my mind, something else occurs to me now. If Google is keeping track of search histories, aren't personalized searches the next step. If Google can tell what type of sites you like to use, couldn't they lean the search one way or the other?
This will drive the seo guys crazy.
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Google amazes me. It is the only company which could get away with stuff that is so rife with privacy problems as this.
No, you don't have to delete it. Just don't login. Duh.
Am I the only one who saw Google Adds and thought, "typo..."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
but this is not the google calendar we were looking for. Come on, Google -- you know everything else about me -- my shopping habits, my personal emails, what I search for at 3am, don't you want my daily scheduling info as well?
Does google have porn ads in the first place? In any case, if you're worried about your employers in this way I'd suggest you don't log in to Google at work in the first place.
Personally I wouldn't log in to any account from work, or from any computer that I don't own. Maybe it's paranoia, but I don't trust that my computer at work doesn't have a keystroke logger. I'd call it a good security practice.
Yes, you're connecting from a system that is completely under his control.
Connect a bot up to a dictionary, and randomly pull words out of the dictionary and run google searches on them. There'll be so much noise associated with your searches that it'll be hard to separate out useful information.
Don't log in at work. Or have a work account and a home account. How hard is that?
---John Holmes...
Of course I speak for all of us on Slashdot when I say, I do not need another way for mom to find my pr0n.
First people saying that the Google guys are trying to avoid taxes by cutting their salary to $1.00 a year, now people are paranoid that providing an option to save your searchs is part of some big consperacy to create a profile on everyone. You don't have to log in when you search. Besides, they'd be able to make a much better profile by reading your Gmail account than by saving your search history in your account. In fact any email provider could do that.
Are some people just pissed that Google can be such a big company and still be (semi) reputable?