>If you type anything into Google's search box, your search will be recorded and preserved forever so that Google's engineers can analyze usage patterns. How else would they improve their search algorithm?

Or only retain the data for a set period of time. You can refine indexes with 6-12 months of data. You'd only want to keep unaggregated data for more than that if you were building profiles of individual people.

You can delete your data from your Google account though.

That's what happens now. You you check the "use my data to improve xyz services" box.

Well yeah, but it would be way more expensive and you would have orders of magnitude less data. There are also issues with biased sampling.

Point being, the search wouldn't be as good.

Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they end up trolling each thread you post to.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I've banned this account for now, but if you want to email [email protected] a new username, we can rename the account and unban it for you.

This assumes a fixed definition of “good.” I would argue that the search would be better because it was done using data collected only from parties who have given consent.

You can define “good” in terms of cost, revenue, sampling bias, relevance, etc. I can define it in terms of ethical data collection and usage. Who’s to say which definition is correct?