The least surprising recent development I can think of, is Google Desktop search. Nice idea, but this FAQ answer on Mozilla Firefox is a joke.
It says "we may choose to support Firefox later" where it should say "We'll have Firefox support in a few weeks". We're supposed to be thinking that Google are the good guys, and here they are as "Microsoft only" as you can get.
It's even easy to do. Using the Slogger plugin for Firefox I've been archiving my Firefox history for a couple of months now. I run the Swish-E indexer on that from time to time, and then a perl CGI script gives me in-browser indexed search history. If the indexer API of Google Desktop is hackable, then there you are - simply replace Swish-E with Google Desktop and you're done.

[Obviously just letting Desktop Google index Slogger's cache will get you halfway there - but you don't get the browsing history metadata]

[UPDATE: Continue here for some Google specific Slogger tips]