Search Record imagines ways in which personal data trails created through everyday activity can be re-contextualized to serve as meaningful personal archives. It takes the form of a collection of digital and physical presentations of the artist's Google Search history, as well as a set of web tools that allows users to produce new artifacts from their own histories.

Early last year, I learned about Google Takeout, a service that allows users to download archives of their data being stored on Google servers. I requested a copy of a few selected items – things like my location history, email correspondences, and old calendars. The file that got my attention was called ‘MyActivity.json,’ and it contained nearly 80,000 search queries from the last decade of my life. Not yet adept at parsing JSON files, I waded through the file in my text editor, catching glimpses of humor, forgotten memories, and cringe-worthy inquiries. There was something shockingly intimate about looking at this corpus of text, like discovering an old journal I’d been logging daily without knowing it. For the past several months, I have been designing ways to explore, remix, and present this dataset.

In the information age, the moments of our lives are documented by default – when we check bus times or text a loved one or turn to the search bar to voice a concern we’re too embarassed to bring up with friends. Yet, unlike traditional personal archives, these documents are about us, but they are not for us. Rather, the profiles we generate go on to fuel countless invisible operations that power the surveillance economy.

The impetus for this project is two-fold. I am at once celebrating the possibilities afforded by these immense archives and calling into question the system responsible for their existence. In this sense, by engaging with this data as a material, Search Record is an effort to navigate and understand my own complicated relationship to our technological realities.

In engaging with this archive, I built a number of web tools that parse, process, and present the dataset in different ways. search-record.net contains a selection of those tools, and allows users to explore – and create new artifacts from – their own search histories.

Explore the Tools