Google Chrome gets a cool new upgrade that reinvents your history

Chrome's new Journey feature can help you retrace your steps if you've fallen down an online rabbit hole

Acer Chromebook 314 2022 running Google Chrome
(Image credit: Google)

We've all done it: we've been looking for something specific, then we got distracted, then we couldn't remember what we'd been looking for in the first place. Or maybe you did a bunch of research, and when you want to come back to what you've found, you can't remember exactly where to look. Chrome Journeys is designed to help with that.

It's a new feature for the desktop version of Google's browser that groups your search history by topic and activity, so instead of just seeing a list of pages in the order you visited them, you can see collections of pages with a common theme.

You can turn the feature off if you wish, but if not you can access it simply by typing a topic into the search bar and then clicking Resume Your Research. So for example you might type "travel" and see all the travel-related pages you've been looking at.

Many journeys but only one browser

For now, Journeys is limited to the browser on the device that you're using, so for example if you've been searching on your Android phone and on your Chromebook you won't be able to see results from your phone on your Chromebook or vice-versa. But if it proves popular we're sure Google will make it sync across everything, and tie the feature to your Google Account rather than your current device.

Journeys is rolling out now in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Turkish. There's no Android or iOS version as yet but we're sure it's coming.

In addition to Journeys, Google also announced some new goodies for Chrome users. There are new Chrome Actions coming to desktop and mobile enabling you to do more via the address bar, such as view your history or play the Chrome Dino game, and there's a brand new Chrome widget for Android.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).