thank you google

As the Bush adminstration shows its despotic leanings yet another time, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! have all given into the government requests for user search information to seek out how Americans find their porn on the internet. The short story is that the government wants to figure out how often porn comes up in searches and how many times it is searched for -- by looking at raw data. Never mind that robots and non-humans use the search engines as much as humans do and nullify any useful data, never mind that there's little that can be gained that can't be gained by looking at the publically accesible data that's already out there (Yahoo's buzz or Google's Zeitgeist -- and the broader numbers that I assume exist behind those pages -- for instance), no, the government truly wants to play the role of big brother yet again and intends to step on the privacy rights of individual Americans to do it. Big Brother knows best and is always benevolent, after all...

As everybody knows by now, Google is refusing to give in. They are respecting the rights of you and me and standing up to a government that is yet again stepping beyond the bounds of civil rights to control us all just a little bit more. Granted, it's good business and excellent publicity, but whatever their intentions I applaud Google and reinforce my intent to use them as my one and only search engine and provider of related web activities. I see no point in using any of the other three services again.