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Google Personal Search Gets Trendy

By Nate Mook, BetaNews

December 21, 2005, 12:13 PM

Google Zeitgeist is great for seeing global patterns in Web searches, but what about your own search history? Google has expanded its Personalized Search feature to track similar trends in the browsing habits of each of its users. You can find out what topics you're most interested in and what sources you value most.

"I'm pretty addicted to looking at my search history for interesting patterns," said Google software engineer Yu Chen. "So I decided to go a step further and write a script to pull together some stats about how I was searching. We thought other people might like to see this sort of thing too, so today we launched a Trends feature that gives you a look at a list of your top searches and clicks and other info about your search activity."

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By extremely well

posted Dec 22, 2005 - 3:30 AM

Seems slightly useless for me. A better solution to the problem of "damn, I should have bookmarked that page" is to have some kind of cache digesting utility that'll keep text-only plus url of every visited website. I'd allocate 4GB for the compressed data which should hold probably a year's worth of browsing/reading, if not more. When gets full, move it to DVD+R cuz it's most likely won't ever be needed, but it could be! I think either Google Desktop or MSN Desktop have something like that though I believe they have some limitations (won't index big files etc).

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By Pegusis2

posted Dec 22, 2005 - 12:02 AM

Is this supposed to be a good thing? It just means that even more sites are tracking everything you do...? Just more precise on spam hits? Make a consumer even more exploited when this information gets into a spammers hands it's just going to give them more accurate spamming techniques? I don't know but it seems to me that our ISP's (yours and mine) are not supposed to throw out this information to just anyone so why should google be allowed? I'd like to think that I can watch TV with-out being followed to each and every Discovery channel... speaking of which why do they show Poker on Discovery channel anyway??? Doesn't that more fit in with sports or something...? Anyway back on track again... :o) My wife is so paranoid she dumps her cache and cookies every time she's finished online... and she's been using the net since it was still in the birth area of the net! So it's not like she's new to it, she actually could tear down a computer and have it back together and running in I'd put money on it... in less than 40 minutes. So my whole point is if every time you hop in your car... walk down the street... or eat at a restaurant would you want everybody in the world to know about it? Probably not.

And this is just my personal thought on that subject which may be up for review... hehe Have a good one. Peggy

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By Kramy

posted Dec 21, 2005 - 1:24 PM

I think I might like this...it'll let me not have to worry about losing links, and it'll decrease the number of text files on my desktop.

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By Black-Wolf

posted Dec 21, 2005 - 12:30 PM

This is a good idea for some researchers.
But I probably won't use it. :D

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By PC_Tool

posted Dec 21, 2005 - 12:27 PM

While I am fine with Google keeping tabs on my surfing habits and noticing my trends, I have to admit that I, myself, don't really want to know.

Bad habits are bad enough *without* me knowing about them.