I unearthed an old Xanga journal (remember Xanga, you guys?) the other day that I apparently used for exactly six entries in 2006, almost all of which were overly dramatic and highly embarrassing to even skim. Luckily I managed to guess the correct password so I could change the view settings to private. As I’ve written about before, I kind of prefer to just lock down these traces of past online lives when I rediscover them instead of deleting them entirely. While I don’t have any desire to re-read those things right now, I always think that I might want to sometime in the future.

I also explored my Google Dashboard with more than a cursory scroll through for the first time. Those of us who are at least a little web-savvy have an inkling of the vast amounts of data this corporation stores from our daily use of its products, but it’s still slightly unnerving to see it plainly laid out on your screen. In my case, a fraction of that data is a five-year-long record of my web history - anything I’ve Googled while logged into my account.

For quite awhile now, I’ve been leaving my Gmail inbox open as a pinned tab without thinking about how each and every search term is recorded because I am always logged in. My first recorded search: “green day pop rocks and coke lyrics” on March 26, 2006, at 9:07 pm. Yeah, I have no idea why I was looking that up; it’s not even one of their better songs! But it’s fascinating to me that all of this automatically stored data amounts to a personal archive of sorts. You can sift through it at your leisure and either remember or be completely baffled by where you were at a certain point in time by what you Googled.

Now, who wants to tell me what your first [recorded] search was? (Click, log in, scroll down, and click “oldest”).