By default, chrome keeps about 3 months of your browser history in its databases. This can be somewhat frustrating when looking for URLs you’ve visited, so I setup a script that would dump the URLs out of the chrome sqlite database on a regular basis to my own datastore.

By dumping this data regularly, I’m now able to dig into my own browsing history in a way that was previously invisible. I can see a timeline of every page I’ve ever visited, how much time I spent on each domain and the frequency of the sites I visit. It’s a bit scary to think about, because it doesn’t take that much storage to hold this data and now I can see just how much time I’ve wasted on reddit and facebook.

In turns out that I issue about 50 - 200 google (now duckduckgo) search queries per day, as well as check all my favorite sites WAY too much.

Not content to just know which sites I visit, I also installed a modified browser extension that dumps the text of every page I’ve ever visited into a database. I can now search for any text I’ve ever seen and find out which page it came from. It turns out, it only takes a couple gigabytes for several years worth of text browsing - less than a typical streaming movie.