That's how they found the boyfriend of Olivia Newton-John, who had faked his own death. He was the most frequent visitor to the website set up to help find him(that's literally true - the website was a trap they had hoped he would visit)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_McDermott

> The investigators claimed McDermott disappeared to avoid debts, including US$8,000 owed to his ex-wife for child support

That's...a surprisingly small amount to fake your own death over.

Google is very unlikely to keep logs for so long.

I wouldn't bet on that at all

Why would they expose themselves to liability?

There's no liability in keeping logs. They are useful for many things.

Logs that can be tied to individual users are PII and very much a liability.

Their privacy policy states that IP addresses are anonymized after 9 months and cookies after 18 months[1].

[1]: https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US

I thought the US government decided it would be easier to pay tech giants to keep data longer than collecting it itself and storing it. That way they can just ask for it when they need it.

What makes you think that?

You can be convicted for looking at a map where the only thing was tracked is your ip? This is all kinds of insane. No wonder the US incarcerates so many innocent people.

2001 Expedia map

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/11/us/internet-used-to-find-...

> The federal complaint says ... the newspaper received a letter that said ''nice sob story,'' with a computer-generated map showing an intersection in West Alton in St. Charles County, along with a handwritten X.

> ... searchers found human skeletal remains within 50 yards of the location shown by the map's X, about 300 yards from where the decomposed bodies of Ms. Wilson and another victim, Verona Thompson, had been found.

> A search by Illinois State Police of Internet mapping companies led to an exact match between features on a map sent to the Post-Dispatch and one found on Expedia.com.

> On June 3, the Microsoft Corporation, which tracks access to that Web site, showed the F.B.I. that only someone with the Internet Provider address 65.227.106.78 visited the Expedia.com site and searched the West Alton area within days of the map's mailing to the Post-Dispatch. The user name of that IP address was ''MSN/maurytravis.''

Well there was also a video which showed him killing a woman. So he was only found via looking at a map but not convicted.

Unlikely. But it can be a clue that leads to the right person, which can then lead to more direct evidence that could form the basis of a conviction on the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof.

It's just basic detective work, updated for new technology.