Google web history - and how to turn it off
April 21st, 2007 | Published in Tips and tricks, Web 2.0 | 6 Comments
Ever asked yourself the question - “What was that awesome hit-the-boss game I played yesterday lunch break?” Well, Google just stepped forward to help you answer that very question.
Google just upgraded their Search History feature to Web history, allowing people to have a look at all the pages they’ve browsed in a timeline based format. It needs the Google Toolbar to be installed, and you have to allow web history collection here. More details on the installation over at the Google Operating System.
The web history display has a two-level nesting of your clickstream - letting you view the original page and the pages browsed to within that domain. It’s super-easy to bookmark pages in the Google bookmarking service from this display - just click on the star.
Now, obviously, this is a cool tool, it has the potential to save hours and hours of headache. However, there are no filters for specific sites to be excluded from your records and once you have a URL recorded, there is no way to delete it from your history. It’ll stay there forever, sitting on a server you don’t have any control over. Of course, you can delete your web history account, but that will remove your entire history, including your dear hit-the-boss games.
The tool does provide pause and resume features on the web page that you can use to disable the service temporarily. If you use Firefox, there is another easy way to disable Google from noting down your visits temporarily. You need to download the Stealther Addon, which is a really cool extension for those worried about their privacy. Once you install the add-on, right click on your Navigation Toolbar and choose ‘Customize…’. Scroll around to find the Stealther button and just drag it to wherever you’d like. From now on, all you need to do to disable Google from noting down the sites you’re just about to browse, is to enable Stealther by clicking this button. When you’re done, click it again to enable Web History. How it works: Web History is maintained through cookies, and Stealther disables them for you. But it disables all cookies, and some sites require cookies turned on for them to work properly, so those sites may not work out well with this technique.
April 23rd, 2007 at 7:16 pm (#)
How do I digg this? Also how do i send it to del.icio.us?
April 24th, 2007 at 1:13 pm (#)
Right now, you’ve got to do it manually… I’ll add support for them very soon.
April 30th, 2007 at 2:40 am (#)
You take hell of a time brother.
September 16th, 2007 at 10:18 pm (#)
Hi Sameer,
From this little gem here:
http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54067&ctx=sibling
It says:
“I didn’t sign up for Web History; why do I have it?
When you create a Google Account, you automatically gain access to a number of Google services, including Web History, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Alerts, and iGoogle. If you’d like to delete the Web History service from your Google Account, click the “My Account” link from the Google homepage and click “Edit” next to “My services.” Then select “Delete Web History.” Make sure you’re signed in to your Google Account to see the “My Account” link.”
IOW, all you have to do is to forget to sign out from GMail and keep searching…
Has anyone figured out how to use the Google API to delete Web History?
September 17th, 2007 at 4:20 am (#)
Wow, that’s scary. I don’t know if the API supports deletion… but you can delete the entire history manually. There’s also a way to pause history collection.
But yeah, it’s all very, very hazy right now. And since this is such a sensitive issue, I think Google could do much better in terms of making what’s going on clear to the user. Maybe the Google Toolbar could have a visual indicator that history collection is active, and have a button to quickly pause it.
September 14th, 2008 at 6:59 am (#)
[...] Google Web History and How to Turn It Off - see comments section for posts regarding Google enabling Web History even if you did NOT enable it. That information has been deleted (or possibly moved somewhere I haven’t found yet) from the official Google FAQ [...]