According to the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo Inc. announced that they will begin keeping their users’ search engine queries for 18 months instead of three.
The retention of search engine queries has been a topic of debate for quite some time, as they often contain very personal matters including illnesses and financial issues.
In just 2009, Yahoo Inc. became one of a few of the major search engines to delete all records after only 90 days to “set Yahoo apart from its competitors and build trust with the company’s users.
The new policy, announced by the company on Monday, April 18th, will reverse the old policy and outdoing Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which retains records for roughly six months.
“I think it’s smart of Yahoo to keep records longer than three months just because that seems too short,” said junior education major Alyssa Stephen. “18 months on the other hand is too long. I don’t see any need for peoples’ personal queries to be around for that long.” Brandon Rodriguez, a sophomore business major, agreed.
“I feel like people use search engines for a lot of personal stuff that they are embarrassed to ask about elsewhere,” he said. “So I don’t think that anyone would want that information to be accessible for 18 months.”
Yahoo Inc. said that the decision was made to keep up with competition.
“Over the past several years it’s clear that the Internet has changed, our business has changed, and the competitive landscape has changed,” said Anne Toth, an executive at Yahoo Inc., in a blog post.
No word yet as to when the policy will put in place.