Supercool Google Feature: Data Mine Your Own Searches!

Yu Chen, Software Engineer for Google has created a blog entry which he mentions how to look at your search history for interesting patterns.

The only requirement is that in order to "use it, you have to turn on Personalized Search and be signed in to your Google Account while you search. (If you don't have a Google Account, it's easy to create one for free.) Just click the "Trends" link on your Search History page, or go directly to your Trends", Chen stated.

I just tried it and discovered information that I would have never considered before.  You can even identify your most popular hour of the day that you are searching for information.  My top Google hour is the 1 p.m. hour.

The day of the week feature indicated to me that Thursdays are my primetime Google day of the week.

The monthly search feature does not have a full year of data yet.  But so far October 2005 has a slight lead.

There is also information for your top searches, top sites, and top clicks but while this information could be useful, it seems that it is directly linked to potential Google Alerts or some other database versus individual searches and click throughs.

QVC was mentioned as a website that was heavily clicked on recently and this is partially due to a birthday gift for my wife Wyteria versus regular use.

Now I do see that my wife's searches are included within mine since I may remain logged into Gmail even though I am away from my computer.  I probably will need to consistently log out in order to keep my searches solely my own.

Finally, there are at least 3 links that consists of potentially recommended search terms from people who conducted searches similar to yours.

The potential recommendations for me (in order) included rss channels, crash clark (an Atlanta DJ I have never heard of), and dr. maulana karenga (the creator of Kwanzaa, a holiday that sounds nice but we have never actively celebrated within my family).

Go figure or better yet, let Google do it for you!


Regardless, the page provides some interesting information to think about.