Your forgotten (browser) history

I'm just catching up on Steven Johnson's essay on the Google/Pyra acquisition and associated commentary. Here's the gist of the article:

How might Google's tools improve the existing Blogger technology? One feature might work like this: Each time I search for something on Google, a list of URLs is generated. When I click on one of those URLs, the page I've selected is automatically blogged for me: storing for posterity the text and location of the document.

I can't be the fist person to point out that IE has a feature called History that's searchable (not Google-searchable, but still pretty good). You access it by pressing ctrl+H, and clicking on the 'Search' button.

In the Slate article SBJ also says "the tools I have for organizing [...] history are minimal at best." Well, your browser history is pretty configurable: You can sort by date visited, by most visited, by site. You can select how many days of browsing you want to keep in your history file. And if you want to store those pages offline, you can set aside half of your hard drive to do that.

A tool that publishes your browsing history to your weblog is probably just a LazyWeb ping away. But what would be the point of that? Good weblogs filter out the crap and give you just the good stuff, with commentary. The closest thing to useful browser history I can think of is Anil Dash's side links (though half the time I read them just for the ToolTip-embedded jokes).

And, honestly, I've had acid trips that produced fewer delirious epiphanies than the Google/Pyra marriage ("Google's cool, weblogs are cool, Vannevar Bush was cool--of course, it's all coming together!").

Addendum: One important aspect of Steven's article I glossed over was using Google/Blogger to track and share our trails through the web. It's a cool idea, but I don't think Google's anywhere near it. In fact, I'd argue that Microsoft is much closer to delivering this kind of service because it already owns the dominant browser (and with that your browsing history, access to your hard drive to store data, and access to your CPU to process data) and a search engine.

The Memex version of IE might include

• an integrated blogging client that uses the MetaWeblog API like w.bloggar,
• a way to share your browsing history with MSN, and
• a way to flag the urls you blog in your history file so MSN knows which urls are important to you.

Then MSN takes all that data, shakes it, bakes it, chops it up with a Ginsu knife, and gives you back the paths you didn't take but that might interest you. Plus, that data helps improve general search results so MSN can compete with Google. Not that I'm cheering for Microsoft, or trying to puncture the growing Google myth. The point is that these things are at least possible in the here and now.