Control Alt Achieve: Using History in Google Chrome

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Using History in Google Chrome

This post is Day 10 of my "12 Days of Chrome-mas" where we are learning all about the Google Chrome browser including tips, tricks, lesser known features, and helpful ideas. You can access all of the posts in the series at: bit.ly/chromemas22

On average a person visits over 130 web pages per day. That comes close to 50,000 web pages per year.

So what do you do when you want to get back to one of those 50,000 web pages, but you don't have it bookmarked, and you can't quite remember the web address?

Well thankfully Google Chrome has you covered. As you are browsing the web, Google Chrome keeps track of every site you visit in your own personal history. This can help us in at least four different ways including:

Reopening a web page you accidentally closed out of
Searching for a web page by keyword
Searching for a web page by date
Opening a web page that you accessed on a different device

See below for a tutorial video and written directions on how to do each one of these.

▶️ Tutorial Video (5 minutes)

Watch on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjHRoeWyrYQ

🚪 Reopen a web page you accidentally closed

So we all know the feeling. You have found an interesting website, and then you accidentally close out of the page. Well no worries! Google Chrome's history tool can save the day.

Simply go up to the top right corner of your Chrome browser.
Then click on the "down-arrow" button.
This will open up a list of all your currently opened tabs, but also a list of all of your recently closed tabs.

Just go down to the section with the recently closed tabs and click on the web page you accidentally closed.
And just like that, it will open back up!

This is a great use of the history tool for things that you just closed out of.

🔎 Search for a web page by keyword

So what if you are trying to find a web page you visited, but it is not one that you just closed out of. Perhaps it was something you opened days or weeks ago? Well the history tool allows us to search by keywords to help us find any site we have been at. Here's how it works.

Start by clicking in the address bar at the top of the screen.
Next, type in the "@" symbol in the address bar.
This will give you a drop-down menu with the option to search your history.

Click on the "Search History" option, and then type in a keyword or keywords for the site you want to find.
As you type, matching sites from your history will be listed.
Simply click on the site you want when you find it to open it back up.

🗓️ Search for a web page by date

So next, what if you are trying to find a page from your history, but the keyword search was not enough to locate the web page? If you can remember the day that you visited the site, you can also use the history tool to browse through sites by date. Here's how that works.

Go up to the top right corner of Chrome and click on the "3-dots" button.
From the drop-down menu choose "History" and then click "History" again.

This will open your detailed history page where you can scroll back through time to see all the pages you have visited.
If you know the date you were on the site, you can scroll down to that date and hopefully locate the web page that you are looking for.

💻 Open a web page from a different device

And finally what if you are wanting to open a website you were visiting, but realize it was on another device. Maybe you were using your work computer when you went to the site, but now you are on your home computer. Or it was on your laptop, but now you are on your desktop.

Well as long as you were signed in to both devices with your Google account, you can use the history tool to pull up recent sites from other devices. Here's how that works.

Go up to the top right corner of Chrome and click on the "3-dots" button.
From the drop-down menu choose "History".
In the menu you will see a list of your recently closed web pages on your current device.
But if you look below that, you will see any other devices that you have been logged into.
Here you will see a list of the most recent web pages that you visited on those other devices.
Simply click on a site from that list to open up that page on your current device.

🏁 Conclusion

And that's it! Google Chrome's history tool is a super helpful feature to open accidentally closed pages, find sites from the past, and even access links that you visited on another device.

Now be sure to add to your browsing history the rest of the blog posts and videos in my series on Google Chrome to pick up more tips and helpful ideas here bit.ly/chromemas22