[kingu]

Doing this would kill their userbase. People would flee from Google in droves, using any other search engine (no matter how bad) rather than have information about themselves sold to the highest bidder.

That data will eventually be sold to the highest bidder. Yahoo and MSN have both already sold part of their data trove, and also submitted the data to the US Gov. Where will people go? A9.com? That's google. Netscape? That's google. Most search engines are using google's dataset already. If you don't want your search data to be sold, don't search. It's pretty simple at this point.

[NJ_gent]

"That data will eventually be sold to the highest bidder."

I disagree. I think Google is more innovative than others who've sold data. That, perhaps, is why Google is doing well and why they're all struggling to keep up.