A few weeks back I showed a link about Google’s personalized home page, a few days after that they introduced Google Search History. Using GSH, you can track how many searches you made a day, what they were, etc. Just today I was searching for something, and it showed a note about Personalized Search Help. http://www.google.com/searchhistory/pers_search_faq.html
As a My Search History user, you've been storing a history of your searches and the search results you've clicked on. Personalized Search now uses that history and orders your search results based on what's most relevant to you. Early on, you may not notice a huge impact on your search results, but as you build up your search history, your personalized search results will continue to improve.
I searched for ‘> < +list’, and it returned about 3 programming sites, and then something about the SAT’s. When I search logged out, it returns 2 programming sites, the SAT site, then something about a Canadian moving company.
I think it’s a great feature, but it’s kind of scary. Since I am using all of Google’s services (pretty much), Google now knows:
My email
What I’ve been searching
What I want to see when I’m searching
What groups I’m a part of
Where I’m going on vacation (via Google Maps)
…it’s useful, but scary. Puts on tinfoil hat
EDIT: On a semi-related note, I just did my 1,000’th search =)
I was using the Web Accelerator, but it sometime’s it would crash and I couldn’t get to any web sites without disabling it. As far as people getting logged onto other peoples accounts at forums, that’s a result of insecure forums. The forum used a GET method to log the user in (the URL would be constucted such as login.php?username=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD), since the GET variables were a part of the URL, Google cached them, but because the GET variables weren’t an actual URL, Google just appended them to everyone that visited login.php. I’m pretty sure Google stopped caching GET info, but that could have been avoided by using POST.
For people who use that, Google also knows what pages you go to :ahh:
Just found the new “Froogle Shopping List”, now Google knows what you need to buy
EDIT: I just installed Google Earth, and it is by far one of the best programs I have seen to date. This thing is amazing. Imagine Google Maps, for the whole world, in 3D (some areas). You can hook it up to your GPS system to see where you are, you can toggle on/off locators that tell you were stuff is in the city. Search for Burger King in Watertown, CT. Search for Gas in Niagara, NY. I can’t believe how powerful this is.
Umm, you know there are dozens of services where you can already search for Burger King over a map, right? Google is just unique by adding satellite photos.
This is cool stuff either way, it looks really pretty. It’d be cool to have on a laptop with GPS, but you’d need to cache a lot of stuff in advance.
Google Earth is quite an impressive program, even though it’s the same thing as Keyhole with a new user interface. I’m really not sure how useful it would be for GPS navigation though. If I want that then I’ll just use my DeLorme Earthmate GPS with Street Atlas USA. The whole saved search results is pretty cool too. The funny thing is that almost all my google searches are a result of me not knowing how to spell a word and not wanting to wait for Microsoft Word to load up.
EDIT: Also, for satellite images, I like to use USAPhotoMaps found at www.jdmcox.com
