Google History - Now Google Knows You Better Than You Do

April 24, 2007 | By Gobala Krishnan |

Confused about your personality traits? Need to feel important? On a quest to find the unique you?

Who can you go to for advice.. someone who knows more about you than you do?

Well, Google of course. Silly me, this should have been rather obvious!

With Google Web History, now Google knows more about you than you want to know yourself. In fact, it’s now easier than ever before to put your entire life details in a binary data file in a remote server miles away from home, and leave the tedious management work to someone else.

Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating. But Google says they want to “organize the world’s information” and that’s exactly what they are doing.

According to Google…

With Web History, you’ll be able to:

View and manage your web activity.
You know that great web site you saw online and now can’t find? From now on, you can. With Web History, you can view and search across the full text of the pages you’ve visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories. You can also manage your web activity and remove items from your web history at any time.

Get the search results most relevant to you.
Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on what you’ve searched for on Google and which sites you’ve visited. You might not notice a big impact on your search results early on, but they should steadily improve over time as you use Web History.

Follow interesting trends in your web activity.
Which sites do you visit frequently? How many searches did you do between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.? Web History can tell you about these and other interesting trends on your web activity.

After checking my own file, I decided it was “safe” enough to show you a sample.

Summary of my Internet activity:

Things I searched for, and things other people searched for before finding my sites:

And, the real kicker, Adwords ads that I’ve clicked on:

My oh my…

How does Google do this?

According to Gord Hotchkiss:

In a nutshell, it will take the information gathered through the Google toolbar and use that, in combination with your search history, to personalize your search results. Up till now only your past search history was used. Enabling Web history, which is what Google is calling this, is very much a “opt in” process. Google wants to get a small beta test bed of users so they can get a data set large enough to let Sep Kamvar, the person behind Google’s personalization algorithm, see what he can do with this additional rich set of data. Marissa indicated that this would increase the transparency of the data that Google was collecting about you.

Read full article here.