What do search engines know about you?
The answer is: "an awful lot more than you think." At the very least, you can expect sites to know and store your Internet (IP) address, your browser identitity, and unless you clear cookies periodically, whether you are the same user on your computer who visited the site earlier - All this from just visiting a site. If you engage in any activity on the site, such as entering search terms, even more information gets logged against you. Below is a sampling of data about you that is logged by most sites you visit:Basic information about you, including likely answers to questions like: "What is my IP Address?", "Where am I physically located?", "What is my favorite browser?", etc. Your geographical location can be more accurately determined with a commercial Geolocation solution. We have used MaxMind's free API. Also, an ISP-assigned host name often reveals much about your precise location, whom you get your Internet connection from, and what kind of bandwidth you are paying for, all strong indicators of a demographic into which you fall.
| Your Internet Address | 38.103.63.58 |
| Your Browser | CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) |
| Last visit from your address | Wed Jun 17 21:26:18 2009 PST (about 15 days ago) |
| First visit from your address | Wed Jun 17 21:26:18 2009 PST (about 15 days ago) |
| Least time between visits from your address | 0.02 min |
| Avg time between visits from your address | 23212.78 min |
| Most time between visits from your address | 444833.38 min |
| If this table is empty, then this information does not exist, probably because you conscientiously cleared cookies. |
| If this table is empty, then this information does not exist, probably because you visited this website directly from your browser. |
Your search history
Furthermore, if you ever searched for anything on the Internet, that information is logged forever. The best you can do is to erase cookies in your account periodically to personally detach yourself from the search terms. But the terms will always be attached to the Internet address from which they originated.To see this in action, enter a few experimental search terms below. It will bring up a Google search results page, but you will most likely be able to see these terms against your record when you return in the future.
Search history of terms originating from you:
| If this box is empty, then this information does not exist, probably because you conscientiously cleared cookies. |
| If this box is empty, then no search terms have been recorded against your IP address yet by this website. |
What if my Internet address is not static?
If your Internet address is not permanent (static), then the search history recorded against your IP address is no longer as relevant, but most dynamic (DHCP) addresses do not change frequently enough. It is quite common, in fact, to have the same Internet address for months at a time. Furthermore, it is wise to keep in mind that even though your IP address might change, an ISP always knows the precise times when a given IP address was in use by you. Any traffic originating during those times can promptly be attached to you.One way to keep your IP information safe is to use a trusted third-party proxy to route all your outbound Internet traffic. But this could slow your line and introduce dependencies that you may not want!
Well, it's only an Internet Address, not my true identity...
That may be true, but as you can see, the IP address says a lot about you in conjunction with your browsing habits. In this context, ponder how many times you have Googled your own name. It doesn't take a lot to stitch it all together.
Should I be worried?
Well, it all depends upon what you have been searching for and browsing :-) In most cases, the information is only used to deliver more relevant and less intrusive ads, and not all of the above information is really all that useful for effective ad-targeting. However, as you can see from the data above, there's no telling what your information can be used for. And the data we show is only a subset of the information actually available to a server!