Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You?

4. Search

Ah, the simple search box. Over the course of our lives, we pour our successes, failures, hopes, dreams, and life events, both significant and minor, into a small text field and turn our destinies over to Google in hopes of finding the answers we seek. The information-centric nature of the web demands a way to locate web sites and relevant information. So it should come as no surprise that one of the first services available on the web was an index of web sites maintained by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991.^[1] More advanced search engines soon followed in the early 1990s, including Lycos, AltaVista, and Excite. When Google emerged on the scene in 1998, the web had grown immensely and users had become discriminating search engine users, seeking ...