A Personal Panopticon
Here is how you can use your Google Search History and jq to create a top 10 list of the things you’ve googled for the most.
First download your data from your Google Search History. Yeah, creepy. Then install jq. Wait for the email from Google that your archive is ready and download then unzip it. Open a terminal window in the Searches directory, and run this:
jq --raw-output '.event[].query.query_text' *.json \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10
Here’s what I see for the 75,687 queries I’ve typed into google since July 2005.
309 google analytics
130 hacker news
116 this is my jam
83 site:chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
68 jquery
54 bagit
48 twitter api
44 google translate
37 wikistream
37 opds
These are (mostly) things that I hadn’t bothered to bookmark, but visited regularly. I suspect there is something more compelling and interesting that could be done with the data. A personal panopticon perhaps.
Oh, and I’d delete the archive from your Google Drive after you’ve downloaded it. If you ever grant other apps the ability to read from your drive they could read your search history. Actually maybe this whole exercise is fraught with peril. You should just ignore it.