How to save your Google Search history before you delete it

[Japlabot]

Personally I think that it is a lot of hysteria over nothing. Google provide a way to delete your search history and the new privacy policy does not give any reason why they would take away this ability to do this in the future.

The only difference that the new privacy policy makes is that that Search History is technically available to their ad platform (which already pretty much knows what you've been looking for based on tracking cookies set when you visit an advertiser's site anyway).

Regardless I've been wanting to clear out my old Google Account anyway (I don't like to leave old information lurking around in case it is used against me in the future) for a while so I took this chance to see what I can do to clear it out but still be able to get access to this useful data in case there was something that I once searched for but can't remember.

So I found this: http://geeklad.com/download-google-history

note: I almost lost the link when making this post, I used web history to find it again ironically enough!

Free and saves it as a CSV.

And now I can delete it from the Google Web History, since I now have local access to it so it is pointless to keep sharing it with Google.

Personally if Google made it mandatory to keep it, I wouldn't have a problem with it, all Search engines could keep the data searched per-user if they wanted to, but they do the right thing about being up front about it, and it is only fair that they collect data in return for offering a service for 'free'. It takes a lot of money to run a company and so many servers, so they are entitled to keep some data useful for them to help pay the bills, just so long as they are doing it ethically and honestly (eg: Not selling data to 3rd parties or sending direct advertising material by post/email/SMS)