How to Download your Entire Google Search History

If you are curious on what you have been searching on Google since you start using it, you can now view or download all your search keywords through the Google History Page, according to the company’s support site.

Viewing your Google Search history is already available for quite some time, but the options where users can download all the data is only released last January 2015.

If you just want to view your search keywords in the past and don’t want it to copy to your drive, just go to Google Web history page, login with your account and explore. If you want to download, proceed to the instructions below.

Download your Entire Google Search History

To download your search history, follow these steps.

1. Go to your Google Web history (https://history.google.com/history/) and login your account.
2. You will arrive on Google Web & App Activity page where you can see your past searches. On the top-right of the page, click the menu icon (three vertical dot), from the drop-down menu click “Download Searches” link.
3. Clicking the download searches link will pop up a reminder window saying “Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual yada yada.” When finished reading, click “Create Archive”
4. A confirmation window will pop up, click “OK” and wait for the email.
5. Check your email.
6. From the email, you can either download your past searches through Google Drive, or download it directly to your computer. I prefer to download directly to my hard drive.
7. After unzipping the file, you will see a searches folder containing all the searches every month in json file format.
8. You can open it using notepad, and you will see your search term after the “query_text” string and the date & time after the “timestamp_usec” string.
9. You will notice the “timestamp_usec” or the date and time is a little bit hard to figure out. We will use this timestamp converter to convert this number in plain English. Go to this website and copy/paste the number after the “timestamp_usec” string to the convert timestamp to date field then click “Convert to date” button TWICE.

That’s it, you can save it for your records or whatever you want.