The Search Is On; "Your search record involves dreams. It's a reflection of what's in one's head".

Byline: Steven Levy

What could be more revealing than a list of one's search queries? The efficiency of finding what we need on the Web encourages us to quest away--whether we're researching a car purchase, puzzling out some medical symptoms, wondering what happened to an old friend, or (gasp) groping for erotica. "Your search record involves aspirations and dreams," says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It becomes almost a reflection of what's in one's head." And, as we learned recently, when America Online temporarily released the search history of thousands of customers for the use of researchers, those reflections can be retained by search companies--and, ultimately, exposed.

The intimacy of our searches has led Rotenberg and other privacy experts to urge companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft not to retain such logs. But the top researchers in the search field believe that the information extracted from studying the way individuals search has been crucial in raising the quality of search to its present level. "Our searches have improved dramatically because we have that data," says Alan Eustace, Google's senior VP of engineering and research. Furthermore, they contend that without the information, they would be severely hobbled in further improving their products. In particular, these companies hope to introduce schemes by ...