Search History, Search Records... What's the difference

If you have not yet tried out MyGoogle / Google Fusion (whatever you want to call it.) then you definitely are missing something. It is one of the coolest things Google has offered after Google Earth. You have to have a Google account to use that, of course. Once you have that you can customize it to your heart's content. It also gives a development kit for techie guys to develop their own modules.

Anyway cool tools aside, there is one feature I thought is immensely useful for all. Search history. Since the advent and progress of search technologies, we have become lazier than ever and don't take efforts to remember what we searched or learn it. We just open any of the search engine and click Search. It also helps for researching a lot of things, but we never keep a record of it nor do we remember it. Search History now does it for you. Once you enable search history on Google, the My google page show recent five searches and the page shows all the search strings similar to results of a Google search.

I was delighted. I search something on my home computer and then I have to search the same thing sometime later on my office computer. I had to keep on guessing the correct search string. But now I just open the search history and I am presented with all the searched I made since I enabled search history.

Isn't this great? In a way yes. But it also troubles me a lot. Why? You will understand the reason if you have been paying attention to one news item which is appearing on and off in technology magazines and news sites. FBI is asking Google to provide search records of individuals (people like you and me) to better enable them to fight against terrorism. So far Google has resisted citing privacy policy and trade secrets as reasons. But really, in face of pressure from the government how much can Google withstand? Remember, recently Google acceded (some called it capitulation) to demands from Chinese government to provide censored results to Chinese citizens so that Google's web-page will appear in China. Given the fact that Google operates from the US and subject to the policies of US government, will it realistically be able to resist if for long? I doubt.

Once I got over my initial euphoria of cool tools, I started thinking. Is this move in preparation to accede to demands from US government when the "pressure" becomes unbearable? If you read the privacy policy for Personalized home and Google in all, it says that it may share information (without personally identifiable information) with its business partners and third parties (US government?). As far as I am concerned, Google is preparing to provide the data.

You just might want to be careful what you search even to gain knowledge or fun, just in case...