search-history on S Anand

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Indian Celebrities and Directors was my top searched category on Google while OpenAI & AI Research was the top growing category.

This is based on my 37,600 searches on Google since Jan 2021. Full analysis: https://sanand0.github.io/datastories/google-searches/

The analysis itself isn’t interesting (to you, at least). Rather, it’s the two tools that enabled it.

First, topic modeling. If you have all your searches exported (via Google Takeout) into a text file, you can run:

uvx topicmodel searches.txt --ntopics 50

… and automatically get the top 50 topics you search for.

Second, an improved O3 prompt. I fed it monthly topics volume and asked:

Look closely at the numbers as well as the image. What insights can you draw from these? Aim for non-obvious non-trivial insights. Run correlations or any other analyses on the data to go deeper and come up with material suitable for a deep research paper.

The analyses it did was far more powerful than anything I would have thought of.

It calculated my Herfindahl-Hirschman index slope and declared that my search interests are diversifying. (Good to know!)
Using Principal Component Analysis it discovered 3 personas in my searches
- Classical developer (Python, JS)
- AI-builder (OpenAI, LLMs, APIs)
- India/Singapore geo-culturist (Celebs, local info, Tamil cinema) I should segment sharing & learning along these axes (e.g. separate newsletters or dashboards.)
Using the Coefficient of Variation it found the biggest spikes in SQL & Databases, and Testing & Code Tools. Steadiest were Currency Conversion Rates and Singapore/Bangalore Local Info.

I should cache common reference lookups locally and allocate “deep‑focus blocks” for debugging spikes.

There’s more. But this is the first time I felt completely outmatched by an LLM. I’m an expert on analysis. I’m an expert on this domain (my search queries.) Yet, this is far more insightful than I ever would have analyzed!

Google search trends

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Google search trends. Here is an interesting piece from my search trend. What I don’t understand is, where did thiep and amway come from?

Comments

ritzkini 9 Jan 2006 10:29 am: from the “the” and the “am” perhaps..dunno..
Madhu 10 Jan 2006 5:15 am: If you realise shareholders of google can just keep clicking away on the links in their mail or search results. Google makes money but shareholders have no cost. If I were an analyst firm covering google, I would employ people just to keep clicking on the ads;) I guess in a proper market, the per click fee would come down over a long term.
Sash 13 Jan 2006 5:26 pm: hey ; are u from jamuna hostel @iit madras? sorry for spamming the place but i want to know
S Anand 13 Jan 2006 8:56 pm: From Alak, actually. Class of 96.

Google search history bookmarks

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Now, Google search history lets you tag and bookmark.

Low Shutter Speeds without Tripod

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Taking pictures at low shutter speeds without a tripod.

Comments

Anonymous Hero 5 Jul 2005 9:56 am: About why Google History is important: I had searched for something from home laptop and I was at office and needed the same info. Went into Google history and found the same thing… So the search history and the links I clicked on were available from any computer attached to the Net. Found it pretty useful…
Ram 5 Jul 2005 4:51 pm: Pls update the placement section with new useful links…
S Anand 5 Jul 2005 6:36 pm: Ah… that’s a good use. I was also wondering if we could do some profiling of the kinds of sites we visit – perhaps by checking what their tags are on technorati or del.icio.us
sathish 22 Jul 2005 11:14 am: probably based on our search history, there could some recommendations to given