Despite the insanely embarrassing situation that AOL is currently facing, Google has decided that they will continue to store search data that comes through their servers. While the data can prove to be invaluable for market researchers and advertising purposes and thus very important to a company like Google, one must wonder if it is only a “matter of time” before they end up leaking data.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/22507-google-to-continue-retaining-search-data.html

Surely Google need to keep the data for Google Trends to work anyway.

If they ever did release the actual data, I'm sure they wouldn't be so stupid as to link it to IDs or usernames though. Would they?

The question is WHY did AOL do that? Who needs to know what user (even if it is only an "anonmyzed ID") searched for what?? Thats the part I don't get.

And I really hope we never see something like the AOL 500k again (but it is cool to play with :-))

Well, it would be useful to see how a user refines a search if they don't find what they're looking for. (Perhaps some kind of session ID would have been less intrusive...)

> If they ever did release the actual data, I'm sure they
> wouldn't be so stupid as to link it to IDs or usernames
> though. Would they?

If they do, they should also only release aggregate stuff – or manually check every search query to see if there's nothing like a SSN (or full email text) or so being searched for.