I read this article recently, where I learned that Google now lets you download your search history as JSON. After a handful of clicks around your Google account settings, you can get a zip file emailed to you containing JSON files going way back (how far back will depend on how long you’ve had a Google account). I decided to make a simple command-line tool to visualize your personal search results. I had originally planned to visualize anonymized results from a pool, but most people I spoke with said they would probably not release their search history to a web application. Instead, I threw together a small tool that uses MongoDB and PyMongo to store and display results in chronological order. You can enter query text and get back all of your results, like this:
To download your results, go to history.google.com/history. Sign in, click the gear in the top right corner, and click download. Google will email you with a zip file of your history.
To play with your results, first clone the Github:
git clone https://github.com/ritmatter/search-results
Unzip the file and move the Searches directory (the one with all the JSON files inside) into the project directory.
Run python searches.py
Check out the Github for this project here.