Tracking your search history.(on the net)(web search engines)(Column)

Over the past year or so, search engines have begun exploring personalized searching. For the search companies, personalization offers the opportunity to build user loyalty by more effectively targeting advertising and search results. The personalization features include such options as saving URLs, archiving pages, organizing saved results into folders, blocking specific sites, and recording a search history. Of all of these, I have found the search history most intriguing. Commercial databases and traditional online systems have offered a search history feature for decades. Web search engines are finally catching up. The options vary greatly among them, but all raise a ...