Google -- My Search History

Google's now getting into helping you keep up with your search history with the release of -- surprise! -- My Search History. All the skinny is now available at https://www.google.com/searchhistory/login .

Sign in with your Google account (I think your GMail account will do the trick) and you'll be presented with both a search box and a calendar. This page will keep your search history. Run a Web search and you'll get a search result page. Proceed normally from there. You'll see when you go back to the Web page that you've amassed a history list along with a list of what you've clicked through for those search results.

While these kinds of utilities are cute, I have a couple of problems with them. As far as I can tell however Google has addressed both my problems.

My first problem is having to back to a prescribed interface. I tested this feature in Firefox, and I have a toolbar with a Google search on Firefox. I'd rather use that than come back to this page. When I tested Google searching via the toolbar, I found that My Search History was picking up the searches done through the toolbar as well as the ones done through the My Search History interface.

My second problem is the volume of searches I do. I do a lot of searches for other people that I haven't the faintest interest in keeping. My Search History allows you to remove either search queries or pages you've clicked through for those queries. You also have the option of pausing Search History so it won't track the searches you're running. Of course then you'll have to remember to turn it on again.

I think if you already have Google Desktop this'll be a bit of overkill unless you're searching from several different computers or you want to be able to access your search history from anywhere. And for people like me, which do umpy-billion searches per day, this could rapidly become a junk drawer. But I like the implementation here, and it's a lot further along than some of Google's other betas.

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