I just downloaded my entire Google Web History (300k).

9 points

14 years ago

I've always used the search history as a power user tool since it allowed me to search within my searches and locate information that way. I'm a heavy Google user, my search history has over 300k searches. But I don't want Google to access this information for advertising. I'm already annoyed enough because it's constantly bothering me with Costa Rica vacation information since I did a bit of research on that country several weeks ago. So I decided I'd stop using the web history. I still want to access the accumulated data though. I found this script which automatically downloads the Google History as a CSV file.

http://geeklad.com/updated-script-to-download-google-history

However, this code is somehow executed on the developers server, so there're some privacy issues here (god knows whether your history is being saved there). So I set out to code a ruby script to download my web history.

https://github.com/terhechte/Google-Web-History-Downloader

This works only for around 4k of entries though. It would be more work in order to support downloading the entire history, for that either fork the script or use the script mentioned above

I used the geeklad script above instead of my Ruby script, but I figured I'd share my ruby approach nontheless so somebody can improve on it.

Cheers.