Cookies are ephemeral and people get pissed off if you set them to expire 14 years from now, for example. What these guys are doing is probably classifying data

Cookies are ephemeral and people get pissed off if you set them to expire 14 years from now, for example. What these guys are doing is probably classifying data with SVMs (or something like that) and that takes time. From brief testing, their updates are not realtime. So I think having an account to personalize in this case isn't such a bad thing. You can search as much as you want but when it comes time to personalization, account is not a bad thing. But in any case, I don't see how this product is better than Google News, for example.