If we translated the situation to meat-space, what if you always went to the same guy every time you had a question, and what about the idea of him writing down every question you ever asked?
So, really, there are two issues here:
- Is Google giving us the right answers?
- How much is our privacy worth?
What about privacy, not having all your searches saved by others? There are several ways you can go here:
- You can tell Google not to save your searches. But do you trust them not to? I think I do, but I'd rather not depend on it.
- You can switch to one of the proxy search engines out there that explicitly claim they don't track your searches, such as Duck Duck Go, Ixquick or Scroogle. I haven't tried them much, but they seems to work fine. If you ask me, go for the Duck!
- You could install a proxy search engine on your own machine, such as Seeks. It does share your searches, but anonymously, and only with other machines who have also installed Seeks. In that way it resembles YaCy, but does a much better job. You can try it out here.
I have currently chosen the Seeks project as my choice for search. Since it is open source I can potentially inspect the source and make up my own mind as to its claims for what it does. The project is very ambitious, as they plan to in the future build its own search index. It may never get that far, but it is currently good enough for me. I might change to something else later, which is the good thing about search - simple to replace.