Scarecrow - 11:06 pm on Apr 20, 2005 (gmt 0)

We figured people would want to be able to edit their list of searches. I believe there's also a "Pause" button which will suspend your history until you explicitly un-pause it.

GoogleGuy, I believe you are adding to the clever obfuscation that's already in the FAQ:

[google.com...] :

"You can choose to stop storing your searches in My Search History either temporarily or permanently, or remove items, as described in My Search History Help. However, as is common practice in the industry, Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users. For example, we use this information to audit our ads systems, understand which features are most popular to users, improve the quality of our search results, and help us combat vulnerabilities such as denial of service attacks."

Sounds okay on first reading, but the second time through I read this as saying that I can turn on or off the My Search History, and I can edit it all I want for my own viewing pleasure, but you keep it all anyway, just as you've been tracking my search terms with your cookie for at least five years now, so there!

How else am I supposed to read your FAQ? Other than giving you a name to go along with your immortal cookie with its globally-unique ID, why would I want to use this thing? I can save links with copy-and-paste into another file, and the privacy I get from doing things that way -- along with deleting your cookie frequently -- is worth many times more than getting all this history stuck forever and ever, personally identifiable and uneraseable, on your servers.