That is not lock-in, in and of itself. It is valuable data (for both Google and yourself), but it isn't lock in. Getting your data back out in a way that is u

That is not lock-in, in and of itself. It is valuable data (for both Google and yourself), but it isn't lock in. Getting your data back out in a way that is useful to someone else, making my history portable is what mitigates lock-in. Lack of portability and exchangeability of things you own, not the usefulness of a service, is the hallmark of vendor lock-in. I can actually get my web history on Google, Google provides an XML feed of searches I could take and give to someone else if I wanted to -- but it only covers a 1 month snapshot. It has the term I searched for, and the link I clicked on. That is a pretty good corpus of information about me. Google could provide all of my web history, that would be a very positive sign of non lock-in behavior. Maybe they do somewhere, but I don't see it on the DLF page. So I agree with you that they could do more. But I disagree with your apparent reasoning as to what lock-in actually means.