Web  History

If you have Google Web History enabled in your account, Google will store your searches on its servers. You can view and search across the full text of the pages you've visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories. Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on the things you've searched for on Google and the sites you've visited. The more you search, the more refined your results will be. You can view your own search trends, too—how many searches do you actually do in a day?

Some people are concerned about privacy and how Google uses this information. Other people are happy to have the ability to search their search histories and the trend info. Find out more and make your decision.

Activities

1. Read more:

• Google Info
• Extensive article about Web History
• More opinions on Web History

2. Watch these two videos that talk about Google privacy. Part 2 addresses Web History.

3. Check your Google Account (Click My Account in upper right corner when you are signed in) to enable/disable Web History.

4. Blog your experience or opinions about Web History.

Google Privacy Explanation Videos

Part 1 Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple

Part 2 Google Search Privacy: Personalized Search

Like Web History

Two similar services:

hooeey is a web application that records all the Web links you browse. Read more here. According to hooeey, it makes it easy to:

• tag, comment, and rate any link browsed
• recall and retrieval of previously seen web pages
• analyze browsing habits

Timelope is a Firefox plug-in that makes your browsing public and social. From Timelope's site:

"Want to store and sort your browser history (privately or publicly)? Want to follow others or have others follow you as you browse (even via RSS)? Interested in endless links that are instantly linked together by keywords? If you said no to all of these questions, we didn't want you anyway, otherwise, sign on up and feed the Timelope. And no, Timelope may be both social and a network, but we are not a social network."

A brief discussion is here.

Blog Prompts

1. Is the concern about privacy generational? Are digital natives less concerned about their online life--more willing to share their browsing history?
2. What are your thoughts on search privacy? Are you willing/interested in sharing your browsing history?
3. Do some of the features of Web Search or the other services outweigh the privacy concerns? Would it be useful to be able to re-visit your searches?