Personally, I find an a lot of the privacy freakouts a little bit amusing. People like having search that works, but trying to implement a decent quality search engine without having usage and performance metrics from your users and your data sets is well into the blind watchmaker territory. However, if they removed all of the information gathering (and downgraded the quality of the search results accordingly) then everyone would freak out about that as well. Kind of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

If you want to read a more interesting (and in my opinion much more feasible) plan as to stage II for google that doesn’t involve genetic engineering (!!!) then you should have a look at: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070119_001510.html