Search Engine Journal: “Google recently filed a new patent for a way to provide search results based on a user’s browsing and email history. The patent outlines a new way to search within the context of a search engine, within an email interface, and through a voice-based assistant (referred to in the patent as a voice-based dialog system). A problem that many people have is that they can remember what they saw but they can’t remember where they saw it or how they found it. The new patent, titled Generating Query Answers From A User’s History, solves that problem by helping people find information they’ve previously seen within a webpage or an email by enabling them to ask for what they’re looking for using everyday language such as “What was that article I read last week about chess?” The problem the invention solves is that traditional search engines don’t enable users to easily search their own browsing or email history using natural language. The invention works by taking a user’s spoken or typed question, recognizing that the question is asking for previously viewed content, and then retrieving search results from the user’s personal history (such as their browser history or emails). In order to accomplish this it uses filters like date, topic, or device used. What’s novel about the invention is the system’s ability to understand vague or fuzzy natural language queries and match them to a user’s specific past interactions, including showing the version of a page as it looked when the user originally saw it (a cached version of the web page)…[What about privacy issues?]