Searchengines know all about you! Are you okay with that?

Posted by Jim Stroud

July 11, 2007

I could hear privacy advocates preaching against this, but I think that this is a good thing; especially if one is tracking down terrorists and such. But that’s just my two cents… What is your opinion?

Check out the article…

What if there were a giant database that contained your hidden insecurities, embarrassing medical questions and the fact that you still think from time to time about your high school girlfriend? Well, such a data store does exist — if you’ve ever plugged such private topics into a search engine.

The fact is, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search all record and retain in their vast data banks any term that you query, in addition to the date and time your query was processed, the IP address of your computer and a cookie-based unique ID that — unless you delete it — enables the search engine to continue to know if requests are coming from that particular computer, even if the connection changes.

Microsoft Live Search also records the type of search you conducted (image, Web, local, etc.), while Google additionally stores your browser type and language. And when you click on a link displayed on Google, that may also be recorded and associated with your computer’s IP address.

While Google Inc. recently announced that it would make its search logs anonymous after 18 months’ time by deleting part of the IP address and obfuscating cookies associated with search queries, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. haven’t yet made their retention policies public. AOL LLC stores this data for just one month.

The upshot: If someone were to ask one of these search engine companies to produce a list of IP addresses or cookie values that searched on a particular search term, they conceivably could. Or, conversely, given an IP address or cookie value, the search engine firm could produce a list of terms searched by the user of that address or cookie value.

Read: Your first girlfriend — and the other things search engines store about you.