CustomizeGoogle is a firefox extension that let you tweak many options and features of Google pages.
On the other side, Google offers a feature called “searchhistory” (available to all those who have a google account — actually, if you have a Gmail account, it is a google account). Acording to what google says:
Personalized Search is an improvement to Google search that orders your search results based on what’s most relevant to you. The Search History feature of Personalized Search lets you view and manage your history of searches and search results you’ve clicked on; this information then personalizes your future search results by bringing results closer to the top when it’s clear they’re most relevant to you.
I love this searchhistory thing. I think what i prefer is that i can search between all the searches i’ve done and all the pages i’ve clicked on from google, from any computer connected to the web. I also like the fact that Google could order results based on my previous searches, what should hopefully give me better results. Actually i’m almost never disapointed by Google results.
Unfortunately, recently i’ve seen that Google searchhistory stopped to record clicked results as such, and all searches started to appear as “Searches with no clicked results” — sigh.
I RTFM, and found a question in Google searchhistory’s help page about this, and they directed me to check if i use a supported browser with Javascript enabled. Yes, i use Firefox with Javascript enabled.
After trying Google searchhistory with an MSIE browser, and verifying it actually worked fine I started to suspect that maybe CustomizeGoogle was for something in my troubles.
I then remembered that some days ago I actualized the extension to it’s last version. After checking the options (Tools/CustomizeGoogle options…) i saw the option causing this “side effect”:
- Remove click tracking
The option was selected.
Actually, if you look at the extension’s changelog, you’ll read:
2005-08-23 v0.25 — Added: Remove Google click tracking in websearch (enabled by default)
If you leave the option checked (by default), Google searchhistory won’t work for you! You have the choice.
