Culture is future » Innovation and digital

My Google Search History, by Albertine Meunier

With a DICRéAM funding
Dispositif pour la Création Artistique Multimédia, 2010, Ministère de la Culture

In 2006, Google launched the Web Search History function and began saving users’ search criteria. Once this function is activated, all your Google searches are accumulated and stored. The interface allows you to view your search history month by month, day by day, but doesn’t reveal the accumulation or quantity of data stored.

Since 2006, Albertine Meunier has been scrupulously compiling her Google searches and publishing them online, thus violating the private relationship between her and Google.
More than six years later, Albertine’s successive searches tell a story—not only her own, but also the story of the Web. Based on this search history, she has written the first volume of her digital history, and her history, period.

If you want to retrieve some of your Google searches in a “readable” format and reappropriate them… follow this link.

This little exercise is totally disorienting… It’s strange, but when I view my Google Search History on Google’s website, nothing bothers me. I feel perfectly at home. Google wants us to think that it’s so cool, it couldn’t be any better.
But when I produce the data using your tool, it’s very different. The raw data jumps out at me. And in my case—but probably in all cases—it’s quite disturbing.
Charles, November 2012

Some links :

• « les bonnes feuilles »

• More about the book

• Searches raw data on a .txt format

• To discover this book

• Digital memories, on LeMonde.fr (in french only)