Gfanatic

Oftentimes you paraphrase the keywords you use when you search in Google, because you couldn’t find what you are looking for. But in the process, while browsing the page results you ran into an interesting article from this website. Even though it’s interesting, you decided to move away from the page since the information you were really looking for was not there. You just don’t want to waste your time. You browsed the page results again, and again, but you were dissatisfied.

So, you changed your keywords by removing some words, and inserting new ones, assuming you’ll get different search results, and yes you did. You found what you are looking for. Then you began working on an article maybe, or a project, and had forgotten about the interesting article you ran into awhile ago.

But the next day, you remember the article, and you now got an idea how or where to use it. This time though, you couldn’t remember what site it was, or the keywords you used to find that page. So you decided to let it go.

But, I didn’t. I went to my Google Web History!

My Story

I was in the middle of writing my post about Super Bowl 2008’s Top 10 Brand Commercials when this incident happened to me. At that time, I was searching about “Ephraim Salaam super bowl 2008″. I found what I wanted but I saw this result entitled 2008 Super Bowl Top 10 Most Liked, Most Recalled Spots. Since it was a catchy title, I clicked the link and said, “Oh I can use this article next time“. But I closed it and went back to writing my Super Bowl article.

Today, however, I remembered the article and thought of using it for my next posts. Although, I was confident I can check the site in my web history. I decided to challenge myself this time. I tried mismatching these set of keywords: Super Bowl, 2008, commercials, top 10, best, etc… but then I couldn’t find the article. So I finally went to my web history which I should have done in the first place. And there I found the site, and I realized I really couldn’t find it then since the keywords were “Ephraim Salaam super bowl 2008″.

Conclusion

What I mentioned is just one of other ways Google Web History can be helpful to Google Account users. Web History also suggests interesting items based on the sites you often visit, or type of videos you often watch. If you want to know how many searches you made each day, just hover over the days in the Calendar and you will see. Also, it shows trends of your web activity which can tell you your top queries, top sites; busiest months, day, and hour. From my experience, it is really fun to analyze my web searching behavior. Remember though that Google Web History only records your web activity when you are signed in to your Google Account. You can use it without installing the Google Toolbar.