Tags: Microsoft

Google introduces Search History and Personalization

Google is a little late on this. Personalization of searches is becoming a widely spread concept. Competition in the form of MSN and Yahoo! has an advantage of having an incredible large user base already through their existing services and both have personalized search facility on offer. Google only has GMail as a popular source to get registered members for similar services. However, they are covering the gap up nicely.

Google has just announced their version of personalized searching (Google My Search History) which includes search history. Of course, it requires user to register and login to the Google’s engine. If you are already a GMail or Google Groups user, your user id would work fine. What it does is logs you on to the Google’s My Search History facility where Google keeps a track of all the searches made from their search engine.

Google keeps the track of the visited pages and the time when it was visited. Also recorded are the searches where no particular result page was clicked. All this is represented in a proper calendar module where user can track his searches! We at TechWhack tested this newly introduced functionality and were quite impressed. Once logged in, all the Google results are converted into referral links, which Google uses to track the hits.

For time periods where user is not interested in keeping track of his/her searches, Google provides a pause button. Overall, it is a decent enough features for people who uses Google for a lot of research and wants to keep a track of their findings.

One thing missing from the service is surprisingly support for Opera Browser. Interestingly, even the latest final version from Opera is not apparently supported by this service. We are waiting to get a word from Opera people on who is at fault here! Opera has updated their browser as per GMail’s requirements and now fully supports GMail from Google in their version 8.

Update: Google My Search supports Opera Browser now!