Using Google Web History

Google’s search personalization efforts have shown significant strides since the company first started it. What started as a simple product in Google labs that allows you to create a personalized engine by explicitly telling Google about specific topics and categories that you are interested in, is now full-featured web history product.

Now, web history is a mature feature of Google search that does two main things: first, it records your history of web activities; both your searches and the websites that you visit, and, using that same this history data, enhances the relevance of search results for your Google searches.

A Google account is required to use web history. If you still don’t have one, you can get one here [https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount]. In the sign-up page you can set whether you want to turn on web history or not. While web history is still an opt-in feature, personalized search (or your search history) is now automatically turned on whenever you are logged in to any Google service (e.g. Gmail, Orkut, Blogger, etc.) using your Google account. However, If you have some concerns about having a log of your history that can be accessed by other users who might get hold of your password, you can either log out of your Google account, or you can use the Pause feature of search history.

Without any help from an external browser add-in, Google can only save your search queries, and specific search results that you may have clicked. When you have gone to another page that is not on a Google domain, google will not able to do that. This is why, for web history to be able to save all your web activity, beyond your google search queries, the Google Toolbar is needed. If you don’t have it installed in your browser yet, you will be prompted to download and install it when you enable your web history.

You can view your web history by type. Right now, the following history types are being saved by Google web history:

• Web
• Images
• News
• Products
• Sponsored Links
• Video
• Maps
• Music

You can also view your history by date, through the calendar interface provided on the right side. This can be pretty useful when you can’t remember what you have searched or what site you visited but remembers the time frame when you made the search.

Web history is also tightly integrated with Google bookmarks, allowing you to quickly add a web history item to your Google bookmarks by adding a star to it.
There are a lot of things that you can do in your Web History, including looking at trends in your searching, looking at your listening history (through google talk), and discovering information that are related to your history. We see a lot of information on the internet, and google web history is one way of organizing these information so we can easily go back to them again if we want.