Google Chrome’s new Journeys feature helps you find that tab you just lost

Google wants to help you back out of that online rabbit hole

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GoogleChrome’s latest feature, Journeys, is here to help lead you back from your web meanderings to where it all began.

Journey’s will take items in your search and browsing history and group them by subject, like travel, place names, or even topics like Covid-19.

“When you type a related word into your search bar and click on ‘Resume your research’ or visit the Chrome History Journeys page, you see a list of relevant sites you visited and can quickly pick up where you left off, whether it was earlier today or weeks ago,” Google said in a press release sent to TechRadar.

In addition, Journeys will take into account how you’ve interacted with specific sites to elevate some pages over others. In this way, the most relevant stops along the way are more easily accessible.

Google says that Journeys will only group search history on individual devices at this time. If you’re researching a topic on your work computer but need to access it through your home computer, you’ll have to rely on your Google account’s shared history option. Google says that it may eventually bring all browsing into Journeys regardless of device.

The new feature is rolling out with the latest version of Chrome for desktop on all platforms.

Analysis: if they’re collecting all our data, they might as well make it useful

Some might be turned off by the idea that Google is breaking down your online activity into categories and topics like this, and that’s understandable.

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But keep in mind that it already knows all of this information about you and it breaks down your browsing history internally for advertising purposes, anyway. In a lot of ways, what Google is doing is giving the rest of us access to its own internal tools.

With Journeys, that categorization of our activity is at least useful to us for something other than feeding us ads. If Google is going to harvest and categorize all of our data for its own ends, making all of that more useful for us is the least Google can do.

John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY.

Named by the CTA as a CES 2020 Media Trailblazer for his science and technology reporting, John specializes in all areas of computer science, including industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general science writing and the social impact of the tech industry.

You can find him online on Threads @johnloeffler.

Currently playing: Baldur’s Gate 3 (just like everyone else).

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