A recent article appeared in the IntelligenceReport (Parade.com/intel), Parade magazine (Feb.8th, 2009)  that highlighted major search engine companies Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo noting what information is retained by them and for how long. Do you know that the words and websites you search for on the internet are stored in their databases for a period of time? Do you know that your searching identifies these terms with your ip address and computer?

The article also mentions back in 2006, “America Online (AOL) shared the records of 658,000 users with academics for research purposes….some data were able to be linked back to specific individuals.”

Here’s what the article exposes as the current breakdown of how long the record of your web search activity is stored in the the major search engines’ databases:

Microsoft: 18 Months; Google: 9 months; Yahoo!: 3 months

Nice…. maybe it’s a good idea for websurfers to reduce their reliance on search engines. One more reason that sites like Kiwibeak are a great service to the surfer—Kiwibeak.com is built to protect the privacy of the websurfer by adopting and promoting a ‘browsing’ or ‘bookmarked’ directory environment, limiting the need to use search engines heavily.

Tags: bookmarking, privacy, search engines, web searching.