Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

Google is promoting a new service today called the Google Web History Service. While technically this feature has been around for a long time, Google for the first time is promoting this service. You need to have a Google Account to sign in and be able to use this service.

With the Google Web History Service, you would be able to

a. View and manage your web activity. You can view and search across the full text of the pages you have visited with this service enabled including your Google web serarches, web pages, images, videos and news stories.

 b. Improve your Google Search results. Since you are letting Google profile you and your online activity, based on your incoming email, the web sites you visit most often etc, Google can provide you with a more accurate and relevant search results. At the same time, you are also letting Google serve you with better targetted ads than ever before.

c. Notice trends in your web activity. You can see interesting trends such as your most visited site or times when you are most active online etc

How to enable the Google Web History Service

1. Visit the Google History webpage. Once you sign in using your Google Account, you are asked to agree with Google Terms of Service.

2. To include the web pages you visit in your web history, you need to install the Google Toolbar with PageRank enabled. . Having PageRank enabled will send information about the pages you visit to Google and associate it with your Google Account.

Observations:

1. Even though you are allowing Google to track your online activity, you can manage your web activity and remove items from your web history at any time.

2. Web history only records your web activity when you are signed in to your Google Account. So just having the Google Toolbar enabled does not mean that Google History is active.

3. Web History does not record the addresses of secure web pages or pages that are prefixed with https://

4. You can “pause” your web history. Say you are visiting a website or performing a search which you don’t want stored in your web history, you can pause the web history service by accessing your Google Accounts page and click on pause. Clicking on pause or signing out of web history altogether ensures that your web activity is not being recorded.

5. You can can an RSS feed of your web history by adding a new feed with

https://www.google.com/history/?output=rss