Google Chrome to let you search for anything form your browsing history thanks to AI, but it may still use human reviewers to review it.
  • Google Chrome’s history search will soon allow content-based searches using AI.
  • This “History search, powered by AI” uses everyday language to find sites.
  • Search data is sent to Google, but page contents are encrypted locally.

Google Chrome’s browsing history will soon get an important feature that could change how we browse the web: you can search for anything there, not just for the website’s pages but also its content, thanks to AI.

And now, what’s new is that Google has updated this feature’s description. It is now called “History search, powered by AI” and it lets you “use everyday language to search your browsing history and find sites you visited.”

But one thing to consider, as Google puts it, human reviewers may still be used “to improve the feature.” Search terms and page content of best matches are still being sent to Google for model training, but if you’re worried about your privacy, Google says that page contents are still “saved in an encrypted form” locally.

Google Chrome has added even more AI features in the past few months. Besides this, the popular browser also “borrowed” the Circle to Search feature from Android mobiles, and it may soon arrive for Chrome’s desktop version via Google Lens.

Ewww… no thanks for the AI features.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    6·
    5 months ago

    I don’t really understand why they decided to introduce this. Chrome’s history search was always rather poor compared to Firefox’s, and I always figured, they wanted people to search with Google Search instead.

    That is a way of upholding their monopoly with their other monopoly, which they could theoretically get slapped for by competition regulators.
    But in practice, it would be hard to sue them for having a bad implementation of a feature.

    • Kairos
      23·
      5 months ago

      Firefox’s is hot garbage. Give me a table where I can filter not this watered down list where even the minor semblance of time disappears the moment I try to search something.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        41·
        5 months ago

        In this case, I was referring to the URL bar search. I rarely use the other one.

        And well, this isn’t really a solution, but as a techie, if you really need that, then what you could do, is to install sqlitebrowser and open the places.sqlite file in your Firefox profile folder.
        Then you can run SQL queries to your heart’s content.

        • Kairos
          11·
          5 months ago

          Yes I would love running manual SQL queries

  • drdiddlybadger@pawb.social
    31·
    5 months ago

    There’s going to be a lot of contractors having to read through a lot of horrible shit and see horrible shit again because of this. I don’t know why they think this is a good idea. I’ve never heard of something so off-putting.