The subtitle to this probably should be “to make your search result experience that much better.”

I guess this was a pretty obvious next step for Google, or maybe an even more obvious first step, but I’m sure it comes as no surprise to most of you that Google does store which links you’ve clicked in search results if you are logged in. You know this by just viewing the right hand side of a search result you’ve clicked multiple times:

So you Justin Beiber fans (I am so current!) know how many times you’ve clicked through his website. I like to keep tabs on when a current production Mac is coming to an end of it’s life cycle.

If Google already knows what links you’ve clicked, why not try to fake the fact that you’ve already clicked that link in a browser/computer where you haven’t? So here is my search result for cmsimike from Google within Firefox. Note that I actually did click it here:

I’ve already Googled “cmsimike” in another browser (Chrome, in this case) before I clicked the link in Firefox and this is what it currently looks like:

But now when I run the search again in Chrome, the same link looks like this:

Well Google already knows I’ve clicked that link but how is it showing up in Chrome (or another computer) as if I’ve physically clicked it? It comes down to the css class used called “vst” (which I presume to mean “visit”) which adds the purple to the link.

And here is the CSS definition for vst:

I’m not sure how long Google has been doing this (probably a very long time) but I only started noticing it about 2 weeks ago since I started using multiple different computers daily. Anyway I think this is pretty cool.