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.