Google doesn’t have to remember your search history

Let’s face it, you Google. I Google. My wife Googles. My parents Google. Everyone I know Googles. Most people Google a LOT. My wife is a pseudo Google-holic. If you have a Google account (i.e. Gmail, Blogger, Youtube, Picasa, Orkut, IGoogle, Google Anaytics, etc), Google keeps your search history. Everything you search for, including image and video searches is kept.
Click here to see your Google search trends.
From there, you can see your search graph detailing when you search. If you click on the “web” link of the dashboard, you’ll also see WHAT you search for.
I’m not sure what happens to all that information. I’m sure Google bundles it up and keeps some kind of statistic about what people are looking for. Maybe they even use it to help them create their year end Zeitgeist.
Regardless, if you want to keep your Google Footprint (Did I just coin that?) small, I suggest going through your Google Dashboard, removing any services you don’t use anymore, and certainly clearing your search history.
Not only should you clear your history, you should make it so your history is no longer remembered. You can do that by going to your History manager and pausing it. This will keep your history from being collected.
Good luck and let me know what you think of this post by commenting.