Delete my Google's Search History?

There's a TED Talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html (http://www.metafilter.com/103273/Filter-Bubbles) that's relevant:As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don’t decide what gets in — and more importantly, you don’t see what gets edited out.Additionally, some argue that this will just let Google (and any company they'd like to sell the information to) have a better idea of who you are. Mid-30s, male, single, three cats, a WoW subscription and searches for porn between 6-7am and 8-9pm? Sounds like you could use a fleshlight ad around those times.

oh man. i look at my google search history all the time. google.com/psearch! the way in which i use it that has the broadest applicability is that i constantly remember something i've seen on the web but have no idea where to find it, or even which computer i looked at it on. enter google search history. the MOST MOST useful use i have for it personally? i'm an attorney and i have to bill my time and i never write it down. i look through my outlook history and my google search history to remind me what i was doing every day, and remind me about stuff i worked on and researched. oohf. invaluable.

In theory it's supposed to do things like be more likely to return basketball links, for me, if I type in "James Jones" because I read a lot of basketball stories on the web and James Jones is a player for the Miami Heat, while someone who looks for lots of movie information might get more links for James Earl Jones. This is more useful if you have narrow interests that share words with more popular interests. So, when I type in "begs the question" I'm likely to get results focused on logical fallacies (I do a lot of philosophy related searches) instead of people using the phrase in non-philosophical contexts. ("Possible worlds" would be another good example, I'm more likely to be interested in metaphysics than sci-fi and personalized searches are therefore more likely to get me philosophy links that I'd find relevant.) In practice, as you noticed, the results aren't very different. Although there is no reason, in principle, why personalized searches couldn't eventually come to look nothing like anonymous searches. As Google refines their algorithms, the results could certainly drift further and further apart. In reality, Google's main motive is their profit margin. They couch it in terms of the benefits to you, but the primary benefit is their ability to target ads to you more accurately and thereby justify charging their clients more for ads. I don't use personalized search (in fact I use duckduckgo most of the time).

Oddman - thanks for your response! That makes a lot of sense. I definitely understand how, in theory, Google could personalize my results to make them more focused and relevant. I'd also expect that, over time, Google's algorithms (and thus, the relevance of my results) will get better and better. I guess my specific question is, objectively - how much better are Google's personalized results right now? The privacy issue is, for me, very significant. But, I work on a computer ALL DAY LONG, and probably average 10+ Google searches EVERY DAY. So - I'm trying to figure out if my search results will be noticeably/significantly/objectively worse if I take the step of deleting my history. Or - is Google just overstating the benefits in order to get me to sign onto this?

One thing I've noticed and it is somewhat helpful is when history is enabled Google will remind you you've visited a page in search results http://i.imgur.com/bhiHI.png. I don't know if when I searched for the term originally it was in the first position, but it was when I searched just now. This is helpful if you're like me and google something then promptly forget it and/or not bookmark it. Seeing I visited as site before will jog my memory. Just as the search history can sometimes help me what I was up to. Since I have Adblock on all of the time, I can't see if Google is serving more relevant ads. I'm not actually opposed to getting more targeted ads if I have to see them. Like that article about Target using its BI to send out ads to pregnant teens before their dad finds out, it can have utility. Right now, the utility (a promise of more relevant search results) is worth what I'm paying (me giving up my privacy). If I no longer feel I'm getting my "money's" worth, I'll use someone else. Or - is Google just overstating the benefits in order to get me to sign onto this? That is marketing 101. Of course they're overstating the benefits because they want you to sign on. If no one signs up, they don't have a profitable product.

Just to underline birdherder's point, they also significantly increase the rank of links you've clicked before. Not only are links you've clicked before called out on the page, but they're pretty seriously pushed up in the ordering. Google knows (and independent research has confirmed) that people very often use google to re-find things. For many of us, the only way we know how to get back to all sorts of resources is to re-search for something. Having google remember what you clicked on last time you searched for that makes it easier to get back to the place you were before. Whether or not this feature is valuable for you depends a lot on whether you bookmark sites or not, and how often you're looking for new pages versus pages you've seen before. Personally, I'm sort of keen on it, but you may not miss it at all.

One thing I've noticed and it is somewhat helpful is when history is enabled Google will remind you you've visited a page in search results before. That link changing colour is due to the browser, not Google, as far as I know. I get it and I have web history disabled and am usually not logged in to a Google account. It might be due to some cookie that I allowed Google to have. As someone who has never had web history enabled, I have no way of knowing what 'better' results I could have been seeing. But it's not like I get bad results.

That link changing colour is due to the browser, not Google, as far as I know. I get it and I have web history disabled and am usually not logged in to a Google account. It might be due to some cookie that I allowed Google to have. Sorry I didn't make it more clear. Of course the link changing color is something browsers have done since NCSA Mosaic. I was actually trying to demonstrate that on the link I had visited before Google added "You visited this page on 2/22/12" beneath the link description. Sure, it happens to have changed color but as a browser behavior it means I wouldn't see that color change if I did the query on another computer. But I would see the "You visited..." if I was logged in.

Another thing about your Google history that I mentioned in the thread on the blue is that sometimes I end up having to do multiple searches to find what I am looking for, with variations on a keyword. Then, months or years later, I may find myself looking for the same thing. Rather than go through the whole varying-keyword rigmarole, I can search just my own history and find the website that ended my search. I find this incredibly useful, even if I rarely use it. On the other hand, I, too, am torn on whether or not I want to keep my history around to be tied to me. When I intentionally am looking for something I don't want tied to me, I know how to use incognito/private windows. However, I'll occasionally look up info on something I see linked somewhere to get context, only to find it is something I certainly do not want tied to me, and I am not incredibly diligent about scrubbing those searches from my history.