Google web history

Image via Wikipedia For the last 2 years, I've been on a mad dash to find as many tools as possible to help me create the perfect life (technologically speaking only, of course). Needless to say, many of my perfect life tools have come courtesy of Google.

The latest is Google web history. I don't know exactly how it is going to help me yet, but my instinct tells me it is a good thing to start building a coherent and accurate history of my web browsing using this tool sooner rather than later. What the tool does is to basically take all that History functionality that you are used to seeing in Internet Explorer or Firefox, and make it all Web 2.0-ey, completely online, available anywhere you can access The Cloud, and stored in its entirety in perpetuity. None of that silly "Maybe if you clear your temp files your computer will run better" (which never really worked, but seems to be a persistent myth even today).

Google web history takes ordinary browser history and makes it complete. In depth. And fun.

It gives you charts showing your search keyword trends and tells you where you've been spending your time. It suggests new stuff that might be similar to stuff you've looked at before. But probably most importantly for me, it gives a complete history that I can browse back through. I tend to stumble around the Internet a lot, and often lose track of where I found an interesting idea that I would like to pursue. Logging in to my Google account and using web history is the equivalent of keeping detailed notes about every page I ever visit.

I remember a few years ago on my way to the office, I read a headline that stated Google's goal is to get everyone to store all of their data on Google's systems. Gradually, I have surely been moving in that direction. There are some glairing deficiencies. I wish they had a service similar to Amazon's S3. Their various services could surely do with some additional integration (e.g., Why the #&?@ isn't Google Notebook included in Google Apps for Domains? Why isn't my Gmail address book integrated with anything outside of Gmail?). On the whole, however, my instinct tells me that the more I live in Google, the easier my life is going to be next year and the year after. And my instinct strongly tells me that there is a great benefit to moving more deeply into Google's systems very soon rather than just a bit later.