Check your Google history

https://history.google.com/history/lookup

by algorithm_dk • 12 years ago

134 155 12 years ago

history.google.com

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

Is there a way to select my entire history and delete it all?

[EDIT] Never mind I found it. It's under "Settings"

[EDIT EDIT] Thanks for migstopheles for the direct link.

migstopheles• 12 years ago

https://history.google.com/history/settings, there's a link there to delete everything. EDIT As you already know.

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

Thanks! I found it a few seconds later.

laichzeit0• 12 years ago

The question however is whether it's really deleted or just not being displayed to you anymore. Only Google can answer that.

fooqux2• 12 years ago

Well, if you're going to be that paranoid, there's no guarantee that they're not still recording / saving all your searches after you disable saved searches.

The point I'm trying to make is either you trust Google to abide by your wishes and not save your search history, or you don't.

dirkgently4• 12 years ago

Seriously, nobody wants to read what Google has published a million times, before bitching about Google and it's "complete disregard for users' privacy"?

This is not news. Yes, Google collects your history and associates with your account _if you opt in_, OR it still collects the information anonymously. That's nothing new. Neither is Google the ONLY company doing it. Apple does it. Facebook does it. Microsoft does it. Every tom-dick-harry and their analytics suits do it. Your ISP does it. NSA does it. And your browser, your computer and your phone does it.

At least Google tells you what it collects, how, and let's you control it. It also tells you what happens WHEN YOU DELETE THE HISTORY: (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465?hl=en) "When you delete items from your Web History, they are no longer associated with your Google Account. However, Google may store searches in a separate logs system to prevent spam and abuse and to improve our services."

Hacker News - ladies and gentleman.

BaconJuice• 12 years ago

Yep, this is scary as hell.

EDIT. How Badly would deleting all my history effect my google searches?

infinitone2• 12 years ago

Well considering that I've had it off this whole time, I doubt its that bad. Maybe even you're getting a lighter version of duckduckgo.

thegeomaster2• 12 years ago

I don't think it would. I've had it disabled for a long time and never noticed anything strange.

djanogo• 12 years ago

I disabled history the first time I saw the option to turn it off (more than few years back), I never had problem finding what I am looking for.

I am sure everybody here knows that this only means that Google apps don't use your history, but it's still saved.

mantrax54• 12 years ago

If anything, it'll improve your searches. I always disable search history, on all my accounts.

icpmacdo• 12 years ago

I would have thought I had more than 11K searches. How many searches did you guys have?

danesparza2• 12 years ago

Total searches: 60382

Tenoke2• 12 years ago

I have 21705 and for some reason my history starts from Mar 10, 2013 (I was sure I've had history on for years longer than that), except for some photo searches in 2011 when I was testing an android app.

At any rate, I wish they did more visualizations, and allowed you to see more than the top 5 results for the ones they have.

philmcc• 12 years ago

Total Searches: 75954

I wish I could see my oldest.

I also wish someone would create a script which would search through my searches (!) and infer what my interests are, over time, and display them on a horizontal timeline.

anatoly• 12 years ago

66k. Aww, I'd have guessed something like 100k. Weirdly disappointed.

mgrouchy• 12 years ago

Clicked on this and says I don't have it enabled. From the collected reactions so far in here. I am expecting that is a good thing.

thearn4• 12 years ago

Same. It looks like I must have stumbled on this awhile back, turned it off, then forgot about it.

slashcom• 12 years ago

Same; though it looks like it might be because my account is a Google Apps account.

Socketubs• 12 years ago

Disable it just mean that YOU won't be able to read it. Google still collect this data so far.

dirkgently4• 12 years ago

Google still collect this data so far.

Citation please. Or at least you meant to say Google still _anonymously_ collects this data?

molsongolden• 12 years ago

Not sure how everyone ended up with this turned on. I have no search or location history :(

ctdonath• 12 years ago

"We are sorry, but you do not have access to this service. Please contact your domain administrator for access."

Eh, whut?

packetslave• 12 years ago

you're logged into an Apps for Your Domain account, and that service isn't enabled.

id3• 12 years ago

It surprises me how many people have a google account with their real name and always keep logged in.

infinitone2• 12 years ago

With the forced G+ integration, its hard not to.

dublinben• 12 years ago

How often do you find yourself using G+, and needing to log in?

lucaspiller• 12 years ago

Why? The NSA already know everything I'm doing, using a fake name and logging out isn't going to do much to stop that.

id3• 12 years ago

You're probably not a target and Google is not the NSA. I don't think capitulating and voluntarily giving them your data helps.

brazzy• 12 years ago

Why exactly does that surprise you? It's the default behaviour and affords maximal convenience.

abcd_f• 12 years ago

Prey tell what is this maximal convenience you are referring to.

thegeomaster2• 12 years ago

I remember finding this and disabling it a long time ago. Thought I'd regret it later when I realize I don't have a lengthy log of my history with Google, but actually the feeling of not being creeped out is great.

doxcf434• 12 years ago

Same here, I disabled it, but they turned it back on apparently.

speedylocs• 12 years ago

How is it possible that I only have searches from May (~500). I'm confident I've always been logged in to my google account, though I only re-enabled G+ recently...

phkahler• 12 years ago

All I get from following the links in the comments is a blue button to turn ON some google feature. Have I avoided opting IN to something nasty thus far?

HarrietJones• 12 years ago

I'm not creeped out by it, but I can understand why other people may be. Total searches: 68452

That is a lot of searches.

ch0wn• 12 years ago

75105 and also not creeped out. Search results are a whole lot more relevant for me when I'm logged in, especially when searching for dev-related topics that oftentimes have very generic, real-world terms with specific meanings in that context.

UweSchmidt• 12 years ago

What kinds of dev-related topics though. Looking up basic language syntax over and over? Fishing for copy&paste-ready code samples?

Or rather badass, sophisticated and cutting edge comp sci topics? Stuff that could ... simplify the application process at any software company?

I'd bet some analysis could show common search patterns, or paths of understanding that programmers go from noob to various levels of enlightenment.

altcognito• 12 years ago

71060 since November 21st 2007. (2379 days). Admittedly, I wasn't the only one who was likely getting logged as a searcher for a number of those years. 30 searches per day. That's a lot of searches per day.

scrabble• 12 years ago

Mine is almost empty, and the stuff in there is just about all dev stuff.

Switching to DDG really took care of this particular problem.

danesparza2• 12 years ago

This is a pretty old function of Google (that predates Google+ by several years). I'm surprised this is news.

gavinpc• 12 years ago

If anyone around here doesn't already know about it, Google must want it to be very out-of-the-way. I would love to see typical users' reactions to this killer feature: it would be perfect for one of those hidden-camera, person-off-the-street, "No way!" sort of ads.

I turned it off circa 2006 and I'm glad to see that it's still off.

mantrax54• 12 years ago

So I always tell my clients to not create new Google accounts just for their site analytics, because Google tracks all kinds of shit in there.

But they don't get it. So when they inevitably give me that account, I go and delete and disable the search history.

But let me tell you. To disable the search history I first need to open that page, and I've seen a bunch of searches I honestly wish I wouldn't have.

hamburglar3• 12 years ago

Wait, you go and delete the search history from someone else's account? And it's your client? Wow. And then you complain about what you see when you're in there?

saraid2162• 12 years ago

It's not creepy if you're the one doing it, apparently?

mantrax54• 12 years ago

An account specifically created to host a site analytics group, and which clients always accidentally remain logged into.

I think I'll get above your cheap outrage and say I did the right thing by going in and disabling the search history.

seky• 12 years ago

Does turning it off just mean YOU wonn't me able see the recorded history? :-)

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

Indeed, that is exactly what it does.

pepsi• 12 years ago

And your location history - if you use Google Now, this is probably enabled.

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0

pmorici3• 12 years ago

Argh! I knew about the search history and had it turned off but I did not know about this location database. I recently got an Android phone and it must save your location history because it is showing all my travel for the period I've been using the phone. This is creepy as hell. This phone is going back.

whatcd• 12 years ago

It's not Android; it's the services. This happens on iPhone's too.

delluminatus• 12 years ago

You can disable the location tracking on your phone. I would try that before you return it. You can forbid Google from collecting location data and still be able to use location functionality on the phone (like for navigation).

icebraining5• 12 years ago

Just remember that your phone provider is doing the same, even if you use a dumbphone. You just can't see it.

jve• 12 years ago

Android must have warned you before turning on Location services. Anyway, you can turn this off in the settings.

jpindar• 12 years ago

Or you could install one of the versions of Android that have no connection to Google.

warcode• 12 years ago

You can also disable both search history and location history through the google now app.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

Location history is necessary for some Google Maps feature I don't remember. But for either of these services you can create a dummy account on your Android devices and just enable it per-device, and separately sync your main [real] account's mail, contacts, etc. Segregates privacy information so any exposure is limited to an individual device or profile.

what_ever• 12 years ago

I keep my Android tablet at home and so my location history is all screwed up. It thinks that I keep on jumping between my home and wherever I actual am.

Nerdfest• 12 years ago

That's fixable as well. You can turn off location reporting on your home device while still leaving location services active for things that need it.

drbawb• 12 years ago

I find it interesting that the `web history` link wanted me to re-authenticate, which I failed to do. (Specifically it wanted a 2FA token.)

This location history came up w/o even verifying my identity or asking for re-authentication. (I'm on a machine that has multiple Google profiles signed in.)

An adversary mining my location history for metadata is _much more worrisome_ than somebody finding out I listened to the whole `Kagerou Project` playlist on youtube for the third time.

I'm not upset that Google has this data; I do use Google Now which practically exists solely to extract metadata from my routine. I just can't believe its not behind a `re-authentication wall.`

adhipg• 12 years ago

Maybe that's because they're both behind different sub-domains and you did authenticate/use maps.google.com for other stuff more recently?

nathanb5• 12 years ago

Am I the only one who finds this to be useful?

Having a searchable search history feels kinda meta, but this basically solves the problem of "I know I found this webpage a while back but I can't find it again". Ideally this sort of thing would be handled by the browser's history feature and stored locally, but the browser can't (or at least doesn't) correlate between "you searched for this term" and "you clicked this result". I also find that the browser's history search leaves something to be desired, and let's not increase Firefox's memory footprint even more by making it better!

(Browser history is also stored online for most browsers these days, and especially if you use Chrome then Google already have your history anyway).

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

(Browser history is also stored online for most browsers these days, and especially if you use Chrome then Google already have your history anyway).

Chrome Sync supports optional client-side encryption, and Firefox Sync always uses client-side encryption.

nathanb5• 12 years ago

Uh, so what are we afraid of here?

Do you honestly believe that if the NSA decided they wanted your browser history, the encryption used by Chrome or Firefox would stymie them for too long?

I guess I'm just not really clear on what folks are worried about happening with these history data. Is the concern that the data could be leaked, revealing potentially privacy-compromising information? Or that Google might mine it in an attempt to make a buck off of your metadata? Or that the government might use it to identify you as a potential political dissident?

Personally, I find the Google search history to be useful, though less useful lately since DDG is my primary search engine now. I don't quite get the knee-jerk "this is creepy" outrage and fear I see from some folks about this feature.

bigbugbag2• 12 years ago

This is totally useless to me.

I don't have a google account, my main search engine is duckduckgo ( I occasionally use google search but always use the anonymous encrypted version) and my browser (opera) offers a history search feature which works well.

yodsanklai• 12 years ago

I find it quite useful for the auto-completition feature, esp. when I switch between different machines.

But still, I deactivated it. The potential disagreement surpasses the benefits. Whenever someone is looking at my screen, I'm always concerned that an embarrassing previous query pop up.

JacksonGariety• 12 years ago

Naturally, you can only remove 26 items at a time. Makes perfect sense.

mikerice• 12 years ago

You can actually delete it all on the settings page, as well as turning off your history.

https://history.google.com/history/settings?hl=en

jebus9892• 12 years ago

I know we're meant to be freaked out by this but I think it would actually be pretty cool to have data for tens of thousands of search results stretching back a decade or so. With a bit of analysis you could get some cool insights into past interests, their dynamics over time etc.

mischanix2• 12 years ago

Yes, to me, this and the location history are just plain awesome automatic logging that I get for free. That said, it's only free to me because I already value my privacy on the internet at $0.

I especially like having a graph that tells me I need to sleep more regularly [1] and I also like having location history that tells me I'm a very boring person in the real world (and that my phone's GPS is wildly inaccurate).

[1] http://i.imgur.com/c6cUGrY.png

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

my privacy on the internet

Location history isn't "your privacy on the Internet", it's "your privacy".

ksk2• 12 years ago

Could you give some examples of these cool insights?

normloman3• 12 years ago

I'm not sacraficing my privacy so Google can get some "cool insight into past interests."

jebus9892• 12 years ago

Ha, no you crunch the numbers, you get the insights. Google does so whether you opt-in or not.

Something I'd like to do (someone else asked for an e.g.) is look back at programming language searches, as they'll nearly always have the lang in the query. I'd be able to see when I started learning e.g. python and had to google everything, when I picked up other languages, how those searches decreased (or increased) as I learned more. Lots of interesting stuff.

pandatigox• 12 years ago

I admit that this auto logging stuff is really cool, but at the same time, I feel queasy about using Google for the logging. If you really wanted to log, couldn't you install a proxy?

jonalmeida• 12 years ago

Like dansparza mentioned, this isn't new. If you want to avoid having your searches logged specifically on your google account you could always use an incognito/private session. (Yes, it doesn't stop you from being tracked entirely, but it does limit the effect.)

Also, DDG has severely decreased my search activity.

6thSigma• 12 years ago

I turned this off years ago when it first came out. I have no idea if turning this off is a false sense of privacy or not.

Either way, I turned it back on recently. There are a few things Google requires this feature on such as keeping a history on the Google Maps app for Android.

dalek2point3• 12 years ago

No thanks. This is what it looks like if you have web history turned off.

http://imgur.com/wgF7Q5J

I've had web history turned off for a while now.

Tenoke2• 12 years ago

An interesting piece of data they show is how often you click on Ads. I seem to do it about once a week, which I did not expect, as in my mind I almost never click on ads (although in a lot of those searches the Ad just leads to the actual site I'm searching for).

What are your rates, and are they surprising?

icebraining5• 12 years ago

Looking at it confirmed what I thought: I just click on ads when I dislike the advertiser. Google usually gets a few cents whenever I search for GoDaddy, for example.

maaaats• 12 years ago

Looks like it's either lying, or I mistake ads as real results often.

GhotiFish2• 12 years ago

Challenge time!

Turn off any adblockers you have, and go to this website: http://www.imgburn.com/

your mission is to successfully download the installer to imgburn.

good luck.

saraid2162• 12 years ago

Apparently, the last time I clicked on an ad was December 2013.

ratsbane• 12 years ago

Is there a way to download the entire history?

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

No, I'm not creeped out by it. Largely of course because I have it turned off.

I am however shocked by the fact that so many people are okay with it being legal for any company to collect such data from people we all know full well do not understand the consequences. So called opt-in is by far not sufficient permission for this. That should come with a signed contract that includes penalty clauses that could in extremis bankrupt the company and jail it's owners.

A contract that can only be signed by consenting adults. Google now stalks your children and sells their data. Are you really okay with that?

It's ironic that it's called "history", because we obviously haven't learned anything from it.

anigbrowl3• 12 years ago

eponysterical

matthuggins• 12 years ago

This is news? Isn't this about a decade old now?

canvia• 12 years ago

I wonder if a competing search engine would be willing to buy your search loyalty based on your past search volume. It seems like your value as a customer would be pretty easy to calculate with this data.

harmonicon• 12 years ago

Turned it off years ago. Thank goodness.

abstrct• 12 years ago

I had turned it off on my account as well, which is what made seeing two years of search history from myself so surprising. I assume when my account was +'d, this setting was accidentally missed.

Moral of the story, just take a quick look anyways.

joeyspn2• 12 years ago

Me too, but we know Google (like facebook, etc) probably logs all of your IP activity... that's how ad targeting works

romseb• 12 years ago

To see so many people on here finding this a useful feature I wonder if there are browser extensions which store the search history (independent of the search provider) client-side.

I love how I can access years of search queries for words in other languages in an extension like Instant Translate: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/instant-translate/...

recroad• 12 years ago

I guarantee you that this feature will cause many people to get divorced.

a3_nm• 12 years ago

You can get data about your Google queries from the Firefox history database even when you are not using Google history, for instance using the following (no guarantees on sanity/completeness, assumes you are on Unix with necessary utilities installed, have only one profile folder, etc.):

  sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/places.sqlite 'select last_visit_date,url from moz_places;' |
  perl -pe 's/%([0-9a-f]{2})/sprintf("%s", pack("H2",$1))/eig' |
  grep -E 'google\.[a-z]{2,3}/search?' |
  sed 's/^\(.*\)|.*[?&]q=\([^&]*\)\(&.*\)\?/\1|\2/' |
  perl -pe 's/%([0-9a-f]{2})/sprintf("%s", pack("H2",$1))/eig' |
  tr '|+' '  ' | sort -k2,2 | uniq -f1 | sort -k1,1n

ansimionescu3• 12 years ago

I'm not a privacy freak, but I still have Search and Youtube history turned off. Why? Because the superficial kind of machine learning done by everyone today (Google included) yields crap results.

Example: I'm subscribed to pewdiepie on Youtube (the other subscriptions being mostly dev stuff). ALL the videos recommended now are garbage made for/by mentally challenged 14 year olds. It was even worse when I had YT history on. At least now I get somewhat relevant related videos (useful when learning about a new technology, a startup, etc).

== Edit

You do realise that I'm subscribed to only 1 _shitty_ channel and 15+ _real_ ones? Actually, this might mean that Youtube's algorithms are skewed toward popular stuff (there's no contest between pewds and Google Developers, lol).

GhotiFish2• 12 years ago

... come on, you have to see why youtube would be confused.

I'm confused.

sergiotapia2• 12 years ago

Well you're subscribed to pewdiepie - sounds to me like the recommended videos are right on the money. It's not like pewdiepie's demo is in the 20-28 year bracket.

izzydata3• 12 years ago

You subscribed to a mentally challenged 14 year old and you are questioning why you get suggestions for videos by mentally challenged 14 year olds?

But seriously, it could probably be improved. Does anyone know if down voting videos affects recommendations? I also wish I could explicitly ignore things on the recommendations section before I watch them. Just out of principle I don't want to give them a view and potentially ad money just so I can down vote them.

ansimionescu3• 12 years ago

Obviously, pewdiepie isn't the epitome of intellectual achievement, but he's not _that_ bad either. I like him because (i) he's Swedish and about my age and (ii) his insane success is a very interesting and relatively new phenomenon. Have a look at some stats, his subscribers and views skyrocketed organically like nothing seen before.

sergiotapia2• 12 years ago

Thanks, just disabled this crap and deleted everything associated to my search history. This is beyond creepy and I just don't like. I've switched entirely to Firefox/DuckDuckgo since version 29 fixed it's developer tools and I won't switch back to the monolith that is Google.

It's funny, but I trust Microsoft entirely more than Google.

flurpitude• 12 years ago

I am unconvinced that turning off search history and deleting existing history really does that.

mpnordland• 12 years ago

I'd forgotten about this. I keep thinking about deleting my google account but I have so many accounts linked to it. I host my own email, but I haven't taken the plunge of hooking everything up with that because of what happened with @n.

wildpeaks• 12 years ago

My #1 request with Chrome would be if it could sort the history by "last seen/interacted with", not by last opened tab because it would be more accurate when I'm trying to retrace my steps e.g. "I know I was just reading X page 10 minutes ago, but that was a page I opened two hours ago, so it's way way down in the history".

wsinks• 12 years ago

I really wish there was a way to see which devices searched for each one. I found one or two entries that I don't remember.

Who is Maurice Frazier? I don't know, but I searched for him today. Time to change the password...

mvanveen• 12 years ago

There doesn't seem to be any way to export to a machine-readable format. Not even the Google Data Liberation Front seems to be of any help :/

Feeling determined and stubborn, I even tried writing a quick CasperJS script to scrape the page data but quickly ran into two-factor auth obstacles. Since Google won't let you login with an application-specific password and doesn't have any API endpoint which devs can hit to get this data, it makes things rather tricky! Getting easy, downloadable access to this search history directly from Google doesn't seem within the grasp of even a determined developer at this point.

LeoPanthera• 12 years ago

You can also opt-out of ad profiling here: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads

Istof• 12 years ago

I turned my history off so that I (or someone else) can't see what Google knows about my browsing history (I'm sure Google keep a copy).

vxNsr• 12 years ago

I have this and youtube history turned off because both use broken machine learning to try to interest me in nonsense I don't care about each time I search for something.

Example: Yea I clicked on the "Oprah gives a car to everyone" video, but right now I'm trying to watch videos relevant to PHP security, and I don't care to see talkshow outtakes in the "related" sidebar.

SilasX• 12 years ago

"Today we reveal our latest feature, where you can get advance notice of how we'll blackmail you!"

pwenzel• 12 years ago

Kind of frustrated to see that Google's Search History feature was somehow re-enabled years after I disabled it.

guiseroom• 12 years ago

Mine too except I disabled it back in December.

pbreit• 12 years ago

I was pleased to see that it's password protected even though I know I was already logged in to "google". Does anyone know what the specific authentication rules are? I'm hoping my History session expires quickly.

joeyspn2• 12 years ago

"Turn your history on"

Me: No thanks, I disabled it long ago although we all know Google prob logs all of your IP activity (ad targeting and stuff)

kull• 12 years ago

Tell me your Top Sites and I will tell you who you are.

My Top sites: 1. www.google.com 2. stackoverflow.com 3. wordpress.org 4. en.wikipedia.org 5. maps.google.com

_navaneethan• 12 years ago

I find it is very useful only.But i am wondering how it captures the search in github and searching in other sites?

It is kinda bookmarks simplified

borkabrak• 12 years ago

Wow, I use Google like, a lot.

diimdeep• 12 years ago

Total Google searches: 63500

I wish there is good api to scrape search hist for analysis..

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

Note that turning off your google history does absolutely nothing on googles side besides flipping one bit which stops you from having access to the data too. They're still collecting all your searches and associating them with you.

arck• 12 years ago

Thats useful as well as harmful! If I delete my browsing history from google search and chrome, does Google still backup these deleted history?

Check your Google history

Related Stories