Escaping Google

Recently Google has changed its privacy policy, causing a lot of people to feel uneasy about the amount of search history that Google has on them.

Lifehacker and the EFF have put together guides for removing your search history from Youtube and Google Web Search, respectively.

However, when I was considering this, I didn't like the idea of just deleting the past 7 years of history, losing all that info. Google's Data Liberation Front has an explanation of how to download this history, but it only includes the past 100 entries. So I searched a little deeper, and found this.

Script to download Google Web History

You basically install this as a bookmark, and then go to http://google.com/history, click the bookmarklet, and let it export all of your history as a CSV file. Which is exactly what I wanted. After storing this file, I then felt free to delete all my past history per the above instructions.

This won't help with Youtube history, but for me, that wasn't nearly as much information.