Does Google remember your link history, ie where you may have gotten linked from in the past and not necessarily where you still get linked from, to help determine your overall ranking and results?
google only keep your search words . which words have your search ? G does not keep your link history
Does anybody have any evidence or examples that shows they do not keep track of this? I would think they definitely track this kind of thing as they are all about taking into account the history of a site.
I don't think they will consider this as well.. if this is the case, then it will hurt if the previous owner is a King of Spammer
that's why you have to keep building link to make up for the one's you've lost.... when the PR of a site drops it usually means that they have lost links or some of the sites linking to them lost links
the one's that have been found and still exist. Although interestingly enough the site:mydomain.com command still shows pages that have been deleted more than a year ago. the link:command continues to show links for about a year until the slowly disappear.
even if they no longer exist - google would still have known about them and would work it out into the whole picture
Though no proof at the moment .. but i am think Google has enough resources to also keep that history for future decisions. As you know webpages are growing day by day and burden on Google increases to display most relevant pages out of big indexes so it might help at some moment in future.