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browse features shown as a drop down on the right arrow of their main page, find Ask IQ: Popular searches and it will take you to a one page summary of the top searches. Note: clicking on any links will open up a regular Ask.com search page.

Another three are Digg, Stumble Upon and Del.icio.us, they are social user sites that rely on their users to bookmark sites of preference or interest. What they all feature is the most popular tagged sites, blogs, videos, articles and music, of their users, in order of preference. You do not need to be a member to see this ranking and it is on the main page, for all of them. If you do join, then you can add your own tags, but you also get to see a word cloud of the hottest tags, a word cloud is just that, a cloud of words. Anything from 10-200, you can choose the amount displayed. The word cloud quickly lets you see rank by their size in the cloud, the bigger the word the higher it is ranked.

Being able to view and analyse global to local trends quickly becomes an indispensable tool, in any writer's ongoing acquisition of skill sets that enable a better article, poem, debate, novel etc. Searching the surfers will continue to provide access to the pulse, beat and rhythm of the immense online world that grows bigger everyday.

I did mention locally as an option to searching the surfer, and I will go into it a bit, but it smacks, invasion of privacy to me. In principal when you use any online service you have agreed to their terms and conditions, which nearly always allows the recording of you, your IP address and what you search for and where you go after ( at least for one or two links forward/backward). If you subscribe to Google History for a while you will be shocked at the amount of information collected about you, Google History just taps into and displays that information. All internet users do leave a mile wide very revealing trail whenever online. Though, Google and other services might be prevented from revealing your name and details, in association with this information. The information and connections to you still exist as a physical record on a hard drive somewhere in the world, today.

All this is information is recorded because you did actually agree to it in principal. To search another person's physical computer, you need to have a court order, or be a family member (but even then, in certain cases it could be argued, permission was needed to view such information), or have signed permission (that thick wad of papers you signed when joining a company).

The quickest way, is to access local personal web search history; it normally runs at twenty days (default setting Windows). You can then view all the sites visited in those twenty days. If you go into (Windows) Internet Options, you can then also view their cookies (small bits of code that record you passwords or subscriptions etc.) and see what is in those temporary internet folders, if the site name history doesn't show you enough. This is all providing that the user does not wipe the history, cookies, and files off the computer, which is easily done. If that is the case you need to talk to someone in computer information retrieval.

Learn more about this author, Ivor W. Hartmann.
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