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Google Adds Search History Feature

Posted by timothy on from the film-at-11 dept.

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."

3 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Paranoid here we go.. by VaultX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Here comes the paranoia that google is tracking EVERYONEs searches..just hiding the fact from those who don't sign up for this.

    --
    - nick
    1. Re:Paranoid here we go.. by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Absolutely, I think the advantage to google is tremendous. They already target ads to people based on location, which they guess from the IP address. If they know exactly who you are they can target ads a lot better, for instance they can target ads for you based on what you've searched for in the past. If they get enough people logging in, then they've even found a partial solution for the problem of people clicking on the same ad over and over from different IP addresses.

      There are also lots of potential advantages to the end-user. Letting you access your search history is just the beginning.

      This is also extremely open to abuse if the information is kept too long and falls into the hands of the wrong people. Imagine your google searches in the hands of an oppressive government. Search for communist writings, bible quotations, or Jewish pickles, and go to jail (yes, I'm kidding about the Jewish pickles, but just think what a modern day Hitler could do with access to everyone's google searches).

  2. Re:What about employers by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.