Search engine privacy issues usually surround consumer protection from online ads. I think there are other equally important issues. To start with, as a business user of Internet I don’t want anyone (least my competitors) to know what I have been searching for. If you have a web business idea and you search for the feasibility of the idea, whether there are other companies already working on the idea, whether they have built feature X or not, and so on, ……. you might hesitate putting in that search string because the Big Brother search engine company will get access to your idea and guess the specs for free.

It does not take a PHD to figure out that search engines like Google will have to face some regulatory rulings in this regard some time in the future. Regulators could come up with some encryption algorithm that encodes search strings. These encryption gateways could be installed by the ISPs. Search info collected by Google robots on the other hand will also be encrypted by the same algorithm (with Google or the ISP having no access to the algorithm). With this solution, Google will never come to know what you searched for and yet give you the results of your search. The problem is that we cannot monetize the encryption gateway so much if the algorithm is written by the regulators themselves. But at least we stop the possibility of a Big Brother emerging.