Chart: Since I activated “Google Search History” exactly two years ago, I have used Google for 9,973 searches. I have a day-by-day record of every search and where I clicked after the search. The chart above shows my personal “trends” related to when I search. (From 10-11 PM is my “prime time.”) Starting today, Google will allow a user to record not only their search history, but a history of every website visited.

[Note: Before you read any further, let me assure you. The feature you are about to read about is something you must sign up for and activate. You can pause and resume it with a click. And you can delete it if you decide you don't like how much information is being collected about what you do on the Internet. Okay, with that assurance, you can proceed.]

In addition to renaming “Froogle,” Google also renamed “Search History” today — as announced in the Google Blog, it’s now called Web History. (Also, Danny Sullivan explains it here. Later: A great review and some historical perspective from Anil Dash.)

I have had Google’s Search History activated since April 20, 2005 (when I read about it here), I now have a history of the 9,973 Google searches I’ve made during the past two years. When it was merely “Search History,” it detailed every search I’ve made, including the websites I chose to visit after the search. I can navigate that data in a number of ways, including a calendar view or segmented by the type of search I was making: for a map, an image, news, etc. I can view all sorts of “attention” data that show the sites I have clicked on the most following a Google search, or the times of day and night that I have made Google searches (10-11 p.m. is my biggest search hour of the day, Wednesday is my biggest day and December is my biggest month).

The newly renamed service goes beyond chronicling merely what I’ve “searched” for via Google, but now maintains a history of every site I visit — complete with a time-stamp of when I visited. And, perhaps the most significant feature of all — if it truly exists — is speculated by Gary Price: that Google is caching a version of the page you visited, so that when you search across your history, you can find the site as it was when you visited. Yes, that is truly amazing, if it works, and is a feature that could make one overlook all of the creepiness of being shown the reality of everything Google knows about you when you use one service for searching, mapping, comparing products, sending email, and then, embed a tool of theirs in your web browser.

I would find it helpful to hear from some of the folks associated with AttentionTrust.org, as this type of data — and the belief that we, as users, “own” this data — is their focus. While I can see how to activate, pause, edit or delete the data stored in my “Web History,” I haven’t seen yet if I can “export” the information. If a user can export such data, it becomes more than a “feature,” it becomes the basis of an economy where I can exchange such data about myself for something of tangible value beyond the transaction I have engaged in with Google by exchanging my attention for the value I derive from the efficiency and productivity they provide me through such a service. If I can export that attention data, not only will Google be rewarded for knowing exactly what type of car I am shopping for at the moment, I will also be able to benefit from it in the marketplace.

Something about all of this makes me think of a song by Police.

Every move you make
Every breath you take
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Ill be watching you

Bonus links:

I’m glad others share my pet-peeve with page-view boosting hacks that are common on some magazine (and other) websites. Mike Davidson says that breaking up a story (pagination) to juice pageviews is evil.

Quote:

“Over the last several years, many publishers have convinced themselves that breaking up stories into sometimes as many as ten pages is an acceptable way to present content on the web. The realistic ones at least admit that it’s a cheap way to boost stats. The disingenuous (or naive) ones actually posit that they are improving readability and usability for their audiences by reducing scrolling. Because scrolling is so hard.”

I saw this via Rex Sorgatz, who says he isn’t bothered by it. “I’ve just always been willing to find the ‘print’ button,” he says. My problem with the “slide-show” version of this page-view juicing hack (the even-more-evil cousin of the pagination hack) is that there’s no “print” button. Question to Rex S: Do you include list slide shows in your year-end list of lists?”

My quote of the day does not come from a blog, but from a person in the marketing and media field with whom I am working on projects related to what people who read this blog call social or conversational media. Recently in a conversation with this very smart person, I used the word widget, which led to the inevitable question I receive whenever I use words like widget or, even, wiki, with people from the real world. Today, I emailed him a link to this post on Read/Write Web called “Widgetsphere: New Playground For Marketers.” Along with some comments related to our projects, he included this observation: “Social media could be helped if people who create these things would stop coming up with so many goofy-ass names. Widgets. Widgetsphere. Makes it hard to take this stuff seriously.”

In light of my earlier post about Froogle, maybe he has a point.

I have no doubt that “blogs” would have been adopted more quickly by businesses if they were called something other than blogs. I sometimes call them “personal microsites” in meetings with corporate or association executives because I don’t want to spend an extra 30 minutes chasing some “I hate the word ‘blog’” comment.* Perhaps the lesson is this: If you have a great service, technology or concept and want to appeal to an early adopter group of tech-savvy geeks, then using puns like Froogle may work. Or maybe metaphors, initials or acronyms that are understandable to those who comprehend the underlying technology (widgets, feeds, RSS) may work. Or words without vowels may work. But if you want to reach real people like marketing directors with marketing budgets, you’ve got to name things in ways even they can understand.

*For the record, I’m glad the word “blog” scared off businesses as it allowed independent bloggers the opportunity to establish a beachhead and long headstart in pioneering the medium. If businesses — including media businesses — had adopted blogs more quickly, they may have developed some of the same “feature-sets,” but it would have never developed the same ethos.

In the early 80s (as I’ve mentioned on this blog before), I worked in a congressional office on Capitol Hill. One of the amazing resources available to members of congress and their staffs is a group of very smart people who work at the Library of Congress who pull together research on policy issues. The Congressional Research Service issues a constant stream of reports on topics related to practically any policy issue you can imagine. When I was a hill staffer, one of my favorite wonk-hideaways was a reading room in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress where CRS reports were distributed. Back when I worked on the Hill — over 20 years ago — a member of Congress would freely distribute a CRS report to constituents who knew what to ask for. Some really smart high school students working on term papers seemed to have figured out this source back in the pre-Web days.

While occasionally, I see links to PDFs of certain CRS reports, I’ve always wondered why that incredible material from the Library of Congress has never made it onto the Internet as a body-of-work, or organized resource. Now (via a link from Susan Crawford), from this essay by Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy & Technology, I know: Some powerful Members of Congress don’t think that would be a good thing. Boils down to “information is power” issues. Simply stated, there are key members of Congress who don’t want CRS reports (and other information from CRS and its policy experts) disseminated because they include unbiased research that may contradict their political stances.

The law of information physics in a free society* dictates that for every power to shut off people from information there is an equal and opposite power that will open it up. Therefore, I should have deduced that some group would have conceived and developed of an idea like The OpenCRS project.

According to their website, OpenCRS is a project of the Center for Democracy & Technology through the cooperation of several organizations and collectors of Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports. Open CRS provides citizens access to CRS Reports already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports.

While certain CRS reports are already available in different places on the Web and from commercial services that re-sell them, the OpenCRS project is an effort to pull them all together in one location.

This is good.

*Which I just made up, but I’m sure exists somewhere.

• Channel partners & B2B search marketing | Search Engine Land
  A topic of great interest to a subgroup of rexblog readers: When a big company depends on channel partners to distribute its products, how can it push traffic out to those partner’s sites?
  (tags: SEO B2B)
• Suddenly, the web is giving eggheads something to watch | Lee Gomes (WSJ.com_
  Quote: A number of Web efforts are under way to provide for more cerebral alternatives to television on the Web. Call them YouTubes for wonks.
  (tags: video web+culture)
• Computer science takes steps to bring women to the fold | New York Times
  Quote: Even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.
  (tags: technology)