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Google Zeitgeist '05
Garett Rogers writes "Google has just released their Google Zeitgeist 2005. From the site: 'It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We'll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.'"
Slightly OT, but does anyone have any hard information about what Google does with the personal information it acquires? It could easily associate a particular IP with a list of queries over time, information that could be accessed years, perhaps decades into the future to see a particular person's interests.
It wouldn't be hard to tie the IP to a particular person after all. All it would take would be a GMail account.
There should be some concern about what Google is doing with all this information. Storage is dirt cheap and only getting cheaper. It probably costs them next to nothing to continually compile this sort of information.