They were doing this decades ago too. Back when I worked for a county government I talked a fair bit with the sheriffs office IT folks. There had been a theft

They were doing this decades ago too. Back when I worked for a county government I talked a fair bit with the sheriffs office IT folks. There had been a theft of a $1000 bill from a safe at a residence. They asked from google for a list of all recent searches for "$1000 bill" for the area and received it. Unfortunately the report was enormous and not useful: apparently some TV show (one of those antique roadshow or storage unit shows) had recently featured one. If you're as intellectually curious as me, ... perhaps it's better to not think too much about what your search strings look like without context. It seems to me that keeping a local copy of Wikipedia is becoming increasingly critical for being able to have private thoughts in a world deluged with information.