Once you sign up, Google uses a cookie to track every search you make in Google, including Froogle, News and so on, and which links you clicked. Rather than using obvious tracking links, Google uses discreet javascript to track each click to capture which Google result links you click on.
Those of you lucky enough to have Gmail email accounts will have a moment of recognition of the login screen - and you'd be right. Your existing Gmail login works, and this may be the most significant thing of all. Google can now associate your email, newsgroups and web search activity under the one login - do we detect the first hints of user profiling? This may be a long time off yet, but the groundwork is clearly there.
But what about the tool itself? Well it doesn't have A9's drag and drop pizzazz or Yahoo's scope but it is simple and intuitive. The big difference is that Google remembers everything you searched for and clicked on - much like your browser history - whereas A9 and Yahoo remember searches, but you have to save promising search results manually, like bookmarks. Slightly more alarming is that you can "pause" the logging activity, but there appears to be no way to turn it off (short of deleting the cookie yourself)
But if that isn't scary enough - when you see it all written down on the screen, the reality of quite how much you use Google in a day is startling. If you too want to see the horrifying truth of exactly how much you really use Google these days, go to:
www.google.com / searchhistory /
