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There is a reason why Google keeps 18-24 months of search information before anonymizing it - three reasons, actually - and the company discussed them through the Official Google blog.

Google's Persistence Of Memory

The mechanisms behind Google's operations seem surreal to people who have been on the Web since Tim Berners-Lee turned it loose over a decade ago. A short time after it debuted and people started launching websites all over the world, the need for a quality search product became apparent.

Whether one likes it these days or not, Google became that product. Their ubiquity has become a lightning rod for controversy, be it on censorship in China, or privacy issues at home. One of the company's legal heavy hitters, Peter Fleischer, wrote about Google and search history, and why they remember searches:

Three factors were critical. One was maintaining our ability to continue to improve the quality of our search services. Another was to protect our systems and our users from fraud and abuse. The third was complying—and anticipating compliance—with possible data retention requirements.

Fleischer goes into a little more detail about each factor. He cited the Google spell checker as an example of an improvement they were able to make. Google can also improve its search results by looking at what people clicked in response to particular queries.

On the security side, Google's riches come from its advertising system. It's an ongoing battle to keep scamsters in check, and sifting through logged searches helps with this. Fleischer also said: "Immediate deletion of IP addresses from our logs would make our systems more vulnerable to security attacks, putting the personal data of our users at greater risk."

Google also faces the prospect of being mandated to keep data for a period of time in the US and Europe. "At the same time, regulators in other parts of governments have argued for shorter retention periods, reflecting the conflicts in every country between privacy and data protection objectives on the one hand, and law enforcement objectives on the other," he wrote.

Last week, the New York State Consumer Protection Board asked the FTC to delay Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, citing privacy concerns. Board chairperson Mindy Bockstein, who formerly worked in Eliot Spitzer's state attorney general's office, wants Google to allow people to selectively remove personal items from Google's access logs.

Fleischer's post appears to be the response Google wants to make to that request. Google needs that search memory to persist for their purposes, and does not look inclined to anonymize information on a shorter schedule unless legislation forces them to do so.