A European advisory body has criticised leading search engines for not being transparent. It sees hardly any justification for their practice of retaining information relating to all search queries for as long as 18 months; something that Google and other search engines do. It wants to know about the actual use of such information.

In fact, search engines might now be forced to do away with personal information that they collect about their users in a span of six months under new guidelines, which have been proposed by European authorities. The Article 29 Working Party has made these recommendations. Their recommendations are generally adopted by the European Commission. The advisory body also stated that IP addresses (the numbers, which identify individual machines on the Internet) constituted ‘personal information’ - for the purposes of data protection laws, leading to more intense legal scrutiny of how the leading search engines make use of the information they compile.

In response, Google stated it retained information regarding individual search queries for many reasons, such as improving the quality of its search services and preventing fraud. Google suggested it shouldn’t be forced to discard data linking such information to individual users after just six months.