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After I typed "a" into Bing, a list of terms that I had recently queried in Google appeared in purple.

enter image description here

How does Bing know what terms I recently Googled?

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  • I can't reproduce. I'm curious what browser you are using. Jun 9, 2012 at 17:02
  • Google Chrome on Mac Lion... Hey, you're right. I can't reproduce this effect in Firefox, Opera, or Safari. Weird.
    – David Faux
    Jun 9, 2012 at 18:49
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    Ah, the purple list of Googled terms in Bing disappeared after I cleared my autofill options in Chrome. Interestingly, just clearing cache and cookies did not remove the list.
    – David Faux
    Jun 9, 2012 at 19:17
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    That seems to be possibly a usage of local storage on browsers or cookies from where they could fetch recently searched terms.
    – deej
    Jun 10, 2012 at 4:38
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    This is also because the form field <name> is q just like Google's. Doesn't look like they are taking advantage of local storage, just taking advantage of all the browsers autofill options on form field values of same name. Jun 10, 2012 at 21:50

1 Answer 1

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As @Dez has pointed out, it is due to the Autofill/AutoComplete feature that browsers (not just Chrome; although it may not be activated by default) implement to make filling forms easy.

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