Have you ever wondered that just after you made a Google search of something , lets say “cellphones” and just after that, every web-page you open comes up with Ads related to cellphones? I bet most of you wont have even noticed that. Most of you don’t have even the faint idea of whatever you do online is recorded or tracked somewhere. Most of the time, even though data collection is anonymous and it’s not personal data, but it does help companies serve you things like advertisements.
We will talk about Google Webhistory feature in reference to Google search in today’s post. As per Google,
Web History uses the information described above to give you a more personalized search experience. This information will be securely transmitted to Google’s servers and stored in association with your Google Account information in order to provide the service.
For those of you who use their Gmail account to stay logged in while online and you enabled Personalized Google search results, then all your Google search made over can be tracked by you or you can see the total history or trends emerging from your searches. If you go into your web history details, you can see details like Top queries, top sites and top clicks over a period like last 7 days, 30 days or last year or even all time.
It also shows you the trend of number of searches over any period like daily, monthly or even hourly searches. If you want more details, you can click on that specific day and you will have a detail information.
Have a look at the details in screenshot below.
How to Remove items from Web History
If you want to remove some items or even the entire web history, you can do that easily by just navigating to “remove” option and select the amount of data that needs to be removed. For removing entire webhistory , click on ” clear entire webhistory“. You can also “Pause” it which means it wont save your searches till you “resume” it again.
Keep in mind, this is not enabled by default for everyone but as far as I know, most users click so many prompts without even reading it. I enabled it intentionally to keep track of few things which I need for my blogging.
Also, even if you don’t enable it, there is still load of data is passed on even though it’s not personal. But I get a better control over this data by enabling it as I can delete the entire history whenever I want.
If you wish, you can read about its Privacy Policy to understand it better.
Mike M
January 17, 2011 @ 3:14 AM
This was very interesting to me as I use Google email and always wondered how they kept track of me. Thanks Avi for this tutoral.
Samuel
January 17, 2011 @ 4:11 PM
Yes, really interesting find avi. Business is a two way procedure. Google is giving everything for free and in return they are expecting something from you… Thanks for letting us know these facts avi.