What Google Knows
January 31, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society | Technology
John Battelle, author of Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, asked Google:
1) "Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google cookie value?"
2) "Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?"
To its credit, it rapidly replied that the answer in both cases is "yes." Just FYI.
Good to know. The answer is likely the same for Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Of course, if you are innocent in the eyes of the Administration, you have nothing to hide. If, like Martin Luther King, you have any issues with the strategy or tactics of the Administration, then you might want to turn off browser cookies, as a minimum measure.
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