Where is search history stored

Google knows a lot about you. Your search history, the videos you watch on YouTube, the places you find on Google Maps, the apps you open, the emails you send … all that data has to live somewhere. If you want to know exactly how much there is, Google itself has actually done the work for you by compiling everything it has on you in the My Activity dashboard and Google Takeout. If you want to read through your old YouTube comments or just delete them to save yourself that ordeal or get a visual representation of your location history, My Activity is the way to go.

Getting to Takeout requires a few extra steps, but those have already been covered here. This makes for a fun data analysis project if you have the skills and time. Takeout has all this data, plus your chat messages, subscriptions, playlists, etc.

You can find it by going to the YouTube folder in Takeout and clicking through each category. Did you know that Google has been logging your activity every time you open an app on Android?

If not, this list is going to come as a surprise. As you can see in the picture above, Google even included the screenshot I took of my bus ticket when I used Maps to navigate out of the Shannon airport during a layover in Ireland.

Not everything in your Google data is equally juicy, but depending on your habits, you may find this other data intriguing:. Your Google Account also has some things you can use, like Privacy and Personalization, where Google helps you decide what to share. Being aware of the data that exists on you is important regardless of your own feelings on privacy, and now you know where to find it!

Andrew Braun is a lifelong tech enthusiast with a wide range of interests, including travel, economics, math, data analysis, fitness, and more. He is an advocate of cryptocurrencies and other decentralized technologies, and hopes to see new generations of innovation continue to outdo each other. I just built a tool that analyses your search history using the My Activity content from Google Takeout.

Hey Andrew! That is a very cool site—sleek, easy, and frankly more entertaining than I expected :D Thanks for contributing! Note: This is only available if your organization has turned on Internet Explorer mode.

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