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Google Account Activity is a personal analytics tool for your Google life

Google Account Activity is a personal analytics tool for your Google life

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Google releases Account Activity, which lets users track exactly how they're using Google services — from search to email — and from where their accounts are being accessed.

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Google logo sign (Flickr)
Google logo sign (Flickr)

What's your Google life look like? How many emails do you send / receive throughout the week? What's the busiest day? Who do you contact the most? From where are you (or rather, from where is your account) signing on, and how often do you use Latitude to check into the office? Google has rolled out Account Activity, a beta service that serves as analytics for your Google account. It works with both regular @gmail.com accounts as well as Google Apps users who have custom domain names. Account Activity provides a general overview of how you use Google services, including search — by volume, by top queries, and even by search type (web vs. image).

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of drilling down into specifics beyond the top page. Aside from life tracking and other analytics enthusiasts, the Account Activity page has security benefits, too — if you see logins have occurred from devices you don't use or countries you haven't visited, it's probably advisable to immediately change your password and other security settings (and, of course, scrub your email filters). Although it says at the signup page that reports can take a few days to process, we got ours back in less than 10 minutes for each account — the more active accounts, of course, taking longer.