Google Adds Search History Feature

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."

Paranoid here we go..

[VaultX]

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

Not too compelling

[Ars-Fartsica]

Yahoo is apparently rolling out a similar type service soon...don't see much use in looking up old searches frankly. Its probably more useful for these firms to collect data for advertisers than it is for aiding in my future data retrieval.

Re:Paranoid here we go..

[lgw]

That's one of those "extra features'. The Department of Homeland Security can do text-based searches of your everyone's searches - watch for it in the next Beta version! ;)

Spiffy

[imag0]

Ok, privacy concerns aside, that's a pretty spiffy thing to have. I've wracked my brain for old searches and old sites for technical data, bits of code, and so on and came up short a lot of the time. (who hasn't surfed to Google, typed in one letter and scrolled down the list looking for something you've typed in before?)

Hell, i've written my own browser cache downloader for Safari and Mozilla (with snazzy search engine and all the trimmings) just to keep all the places i've been to current. Remembering all the places i've been to using Google helps a lot.

Keep it lean and popup free, Google, and I will use it every day.

Re:Paranoid here we go..

[antic]

True, but now that data will be tied to less-than-anonymous accounts. The advantage for Google is that they will have broached the concept of "having an account to use a search engine" which will enable them to do more powerful things.

Now, I will no longer use Google...

[barfy]

The last thing I want, is a subpoenable search history. I search for a lot of things. I honestly do not want to be accountable for the things that I might search for, whether I get results of not.

People are paranoid.

[natrius]

If you don't want to be tracked on the Internet, there's a simple solution: don't have a static IP address and turn off cookies.

With that said, if you think this feature is a privacy issue, you should probably have your web browser history and cache disabled. I can't wait for a virus that emails the victim's history and cache to everyone in their address book. Hilarity would definitely ensue.

The dangers of Google and slashdot policy

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't panic"

"They are upfront...read their privacy policy"

"They have been logging all searches for ages therefore it's ok"

Listen. Most people don't read privacy policies, so remain blissfully unaware but what they are doing when they use Google. Most people don't even think about cookies, many more don't even know or care what they are. You could argue therefore that by inference they don't value or care about their own privacy. Well, hell maybe they don't. But actually that argument alone is not good enough.

Some of us have been passionately arguing that Google is a just kind of global Carnivore type project or at least with excellent potential to be one. No one knows really what Google actually do with the data they collect; how they link it together to form individual portfolios or how they treat it, manage it, or store it. No one knows how many times they have been asked by government agencies to supply information about their users and no one knows about the integrity of Google's employees, apart from romantic fluff generated by their most avid fans.

On another note Slashdot's obsession with Google is really quite unhealthy, and concerning, and I for one have submitted several Google critical stories here only for them to be rejected, but immediately a pro Google story will appear, giving an extraordinarily one-sided view about Google. If you only read Slashdot, you would think Google are something from heaven, but if you read other sites and news sources you will know that is simply not true.

And ok that is a seperate subject, but I just wonder what this site gets out of making a news item of every single thing Google do, and yet rarely or never a critical story on Google appears. It's actually quite creepy and very noticable.

Here come the custom searches

[rjelks]

While the privacy issues were the first thing on my mind, something else occurs to me now. If Google is keeping track of search histories, aren't personalized searches the next step. If Google can tell what type of sites you like to use, couldn't they lean the search one way or the other?

This will drive the seo guys crazy.

Re:Google amazes me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google amazes me. It is the only company which could get away with stuff that is so rife with privacy problems as this.

Re:Paranoid here we go..

[anthony_dipierro]

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).

Re:Oh no!!!

[aussie_a]

No, you don't have to delete it. Just don't login. Duh.

Google What?

[StikyPad]

Am I the only one who saw Google Adds and thought, "typo..."

Re:Paranoid here we go..

[anthony_dipierro]

Well, I see a problem with it, in that I don't want to be tracked in this way.

So don't enable the history service.

I won't.

Oh, you meant the anonymous tracking they do with cookies?

No, I didn't.

Please tell me how it harms you (assuming Google abides by their privacy policy)?

It doesn't necessarily harm me, but there is a lot of potential for harm. Google says right in their privacy policy that they'll release the information to the government if they get a subpoena. If the government decided to target people who make a certain search which I made, they could easily tie that IP address to a real person. Now I don't think that'd be a problem given our current government, but who knows what could happen in the future.

Google would be a prime asset for an oppressive government. This is already true even besides the history service. With just access to someone's gmail account you can hijack just about every account they have which gives internet access. Think you're secure because you use different passwords for different services? Hell no, your accounts are only as secure as your email account, as anyone with access to that can change just about any of your passwords.

search calendar,

[soupdevil]

but this is not the google calendar we were looking for. Come on, Google -- you know everything else about me -- my shopping habits, my personal emails, what I search for at 3am, don't you want my daily scheduling info as well?

Re:What about employers

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Re:Oh no!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you're connecting from a system that is completely under his control.

An easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Connect a bot up to a dictionary, and randomly pull words out of the dictionary and run google searches on them. There'll be so much noise associated with your searches that it'll be hard to separate out useful information.

Re:What about employers

[Sepodati]

Don't log in at work. Or have a work account and a home account. How hard is that?

---John Holmes...

Re:Yikes! Privacy concerns for the unwary

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course I speak for all of us on Slashdot when I say, I do not need another way for mom to find my pr0n.

Consperacy theories

[Kingofearth]

First people saying that the Google guys are trying to avoid taxes by cutting their salary to $1.00 a year, now people are paranoid that providing an option to save your searchs is part of some big consperacy to create a profile on everyone. You don't have to log in when you search. Besides, they'd be able to make a much better profile by reading your Gmail account than by saving your search history in your account. In fact any email provider could do that.

Are some people just pissed that Google can be such a big company and still be (semi) reputable?