Google finally implements search history - but comes up short

There are two notable things about Google search history.

• Google wasn't first with this feature
  
• It's not really what you're after - it's a catalogue of searches you made, not of the results. So the product plug "Remember what you saw on Google, no matter where you are." is quite simply a misrepresentation of what you get.
  [UPDATE: Oh I get why the plug is defensible. They do keep track of what URL's you clicked as a result of search, so technically speaking the data that you actually saw on Google results page when you did the search is there. But obviously you're interested in the full text of the resulting page, not just the text in the search engine results list]
  

I know nobody else does the right thing either, but still. Actually, this is the other place (apart from secrecy) where the edge still has an edge. Now that the desktop indexing engines are finally here, my local disk cache of all pages I've seen is vastly superior to Google's cache. That's not to say that my cache would not be EVEN better if all pages were tagged with the searches that led to them. Sounds like a job for firefox+greasemonkey+slogger

Posted by Claus at April 21, 2005 02:28 PM | TrackBack (0)