It’s been a week since Google added My Search History and I just re-evaluated my search history. They use a light-t0-dark green key to indicate the (raw?) number of searches for each day and Friday, Saturday, Mon, Tues Wed I had 21+ searches each day. At least one Google search every hour on average? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Since I use multiple machines and not every machine is logged into Google this didn’t account for every search made, but it looks like overall to be around 100 searches for the week (see picture). It’s too bad Google doesn’t (yet) give any sort of daily counter yet.

As for privacy concerns? B.L Ochman thinks this functionality might be Big Brotherish:

Too much like Big Brother sniffing around my stall. And it’s too easy to imagine advertisers torturing me with ads based on my search history

I commented on Ms. Ochman’s blog that those who didn’t want their searches tracked shouldn’t login. One can be logged into Gmail and not be logged into My Search History, so it’s not like they tied in the service automatically as a “hey, check out this cool feature we turned on without your permission.”. Ironically enough, I actually wanted to track my searches for the week but since I use multiple machines and didn’t take the extra few seconds to login on each machine, my searches weren’t tracked across all computers.

Curious by Ms. Ochman’s Orwellian comparison I examined the actual searches I’ve made and asked myself if I’d truly care if any of this information was spied on by Google and/or if contextually ads of interest could be served to me? Searches like: “copy from clipboard to photoshop new image” and “microsoft newsbot” and “should dividends be reinvested” don’t really invade my privacy. I noticed making a number of people-related inquiries. So what is it saying to advertisers if I’m Googling people?

As for delivering contextual advertising? I actually find useful contextual advertising. Why should I look at ads for products/services serendipitously? Sometimes random banners or text ads draw my attention, but I’m far more likely to click-thru something that is related to whatever I’m reading or looking for than some random ad. I see a lot more that could be done at this blog with contextual content placement, and not only advertising. For example, this week I added some dynamic graphs for a couple of stocks I’m tracking in an experiment to the Finance category that only show up on market days after the market has opened. Other finance-related links, tools, tips, etc, could be added to this category. I’m seeing each category almost like a separate blog of targeted information. By adding more of this type information I can make it attractive to actually visit the web version of the site instead of only receiving new posts via RSS.

And speaking of advertising, there are no Google ads (yet) on My Search History. All I’m seeing are searches made and stats. I’m sure ads are coming, I’m not naive, but I probably will be as bothered by them as I am Gmail ads (which I rarely even notice). Now if they start flashing like the inside of a casino … well, then that’s another bag of worms.

My Search History comes across to me as a tool not much different than the browser history tool. I rarely view or use the browser history and I’ll probably rarely use the My Search History, except to look at numbers for the next few weeks just to see how many searches I’m conducting. Again, it would be cool if Google would give me these stats: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rather than just a counter that increments and colorized key by day, but hey, better than nothing at all.

So, now I’m curious about your stats? How many Google searches did you make this last week? What types? Anything you’d want to keep Google from exploiting with advertising, if they should ever start advertising? Any super searchers out there? More than 250 searches? More than 500? Anybody crack the 1000 search mark?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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