Believe it or not, I don’t use Evernote, OneNote or any other note-taking app. Whenever I have to remember something, I open the Google App on my phone and search for it. For example, at a bookstore, I search for the names of books that interest me, to buy it later on my Kindle. It works almost all the time, unless I forget to search and don’t see recent searches for a few days.
Google only shows the last few searches in the Address Bar, and due to the nature of my extensive browsing, I can barely rummage through my browser history to find the Google page I searched for. In such situations, the Google Search history archive is what helps me out.
Well, that’s just a scenario and I’m sure not many people use their Google app as a note taking app. But if you think about it, there might come a day when you want to access your search history on another computer, or if you accidentally delete your browser history, you might want to retrieve it. So you see, knowing about this trick can be helpful.
Download search history
If you don’t know about it, unless you opt out of this option, Google will log everything you have searched on Google from your account. Data mining is a price tag for all the free services Google offers, and as useful as it is for Google, it’s also useful to you. The entire web history for your account can be accessed on the Google History page.
Here, you’ll be able to scroll down and see the searches you’ve done in a never-ending scrolling list. You can also see detailed information about Google searches, and if you’ve been using the account for a few years, these numbers will surprise you.
Now to export the search results click on the 3 dots menu in the top right corner and click on the Download Search option. This option will create an archive of your past searches that only you can access. Google will email you when the archive is ready to be downloaded from Google Drive via email, and depending on the data in your account, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
Note:
Read search history
The search history archive will be emailed to you in ZIP format, but inside the archive you will find an HTML file with all data encoded in a .json JSON file. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is a lightweight data interchange format for storing information on web servers. You could open the file with Notepad, but it would be pointless and you would need special tools to understand it.
Now, as I mentioned, JSON files are in an interchangeable format for storing data and can be exported to Excel for you to read. To do this, open Convert JSON to CSV and click Select file to import the JSON file for the month for which you want to see Google Search history. If you opened the file with Notepad, you can copy and paste the entire contents into the box provided in Option 3.
Finally, under Generate output option click JSON to Excel and you’ll have an excel file with all the searches you’ve done for the month. You’ll also be able to see searches on the page itself by timestamp.
Conclusion
So that’s how you can download your entire Google Search history and read it in the right format. However, even after research, I still can’t understand the timestamps that Google uses. If you are lucky enough to crack the code of (query/id/0/timestamp_usec), please share it with us in the comments or in the forum.
Update timestamp
Thanks to my wife who is a JAVA Developer, I was able to understand the timestamps next to the search results. The numbers are essentially Unix epoch time used to describe times in Unix time, defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 (UTC), Thursday, day 1 January 1970. So to know the exact date for the search you did, open the Epoch Unix converter and enter the timestamp below. Convert epochs to human readable dates select.
The tool will then convert the timestamp and even tell you the local time after converting from UTC.
SEE ALSO: How to Become a Beta Tester for Google Search Apps for Android
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
