Google took a giant step toward personalized search today with the release of a Google Lab experiment called My Search History. this Web application keeps track of your searches (similar to the tracker in A9), but with the added step of caching any result you click on, and parsing its content in various ways. You can search within your search history, and Google matches keywords against past results. You must have clicked on a page to get this caching treatment; obviously, Google does not include all results in your history.

This sort of accumulated intelligence seems trivial at first, and takes time to gain value as the user's search history becomes more extensive. SEW reports that Google clusters personalized results in certain ways when it has enough to work with. You need a Google account to use My Search History (another in the growing list of services Google is using to capture user e-mail addresses)—your Gmail account works if you have one. And you need to be singed into that account to accumulate search history.

All this is dazzling, but the question in my mind is about copyright. Isn't this getting awfully similar to the doomed BeamIt service at the old MP3.com, which was slammed shut with enormous court-ordered damages by the record industry? BeamIt worked by keeping a record of purchased CDs online so users could listen to their collections anywhere. Google is storing cached Web pages online so users needn't rely on client-side bookmark lists and other tools. Google is already on thin ice with its basic caching feature, and possibly with Google Desktop, which caches Web pasges on the local machine. (Browsers cache also.) How far will free storage and manipulation of Web content go before somebody mounts a massive class-action suit?