Google Web History and Search Personalization

Have you noticed that what bugs us the most when we are looking for information is when we know at the back of our mind that we have already seen that something and yet still having trouble remembering? If there’s one resource that contains enormous information that will help a searching user find what he or she wants, it is the user’s history; History of the things a user have seen, heard, and have read.

This is why Google created their web history feature. The web history feature came as an upgrade to the Google Personalized search functionality (which has its roots in Google Labs).

Web history does the following three core things:

Gives the user the capability to view and manage the user’s web activity
You can view and search across the full text of the pages that the user has visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories.

Improve the relevancy of search results for the user by through personalized results
By providing a way to capture data from the user’s previous searches and feed this data to the personalized results engine of Google search, the search engine is able to present more relevant and personalized results to the user

Provide more information on a user’s web activity trends
This provides information and statistics on the search and other web activities of the user. For example, sites that are visited frequently.

Although it is actually a separate functionality, web history is also integrated with Google Bookmarks, another nifty Google service.

Before it was upgraded to web history, it was still called Google Personalized search, and it only included the history of a user’s activities on Google’s search properties such as Images, News, Products and other services. So while the old version provided you with a log of your search activities, it lacked the full context when you actually went out of a Google domain.

Web History changed that. With the help of the Google Toolbar, it now aims to provide history of the web sites that you visit, complete with a cached snapshot of those pages. This is only the beginning of a personalized web experience.

Next: a tour and tutorial of Google Web History.