Google has unveiled plans to stop holding search records that can be linked to individuals for more than two years, in an effort to shed its Big Brother reputation.

The internet giant had previously kept billions of search records for an unspecified period, widely thought to be indefinitely, building up a huge database of private information for unclear internal purposes.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s European privacy counsel, said that the search giant would now “anonymise” data more than “18 to 24 months old”, with the exact date depending on international legal requirements.

When anyone searches on Google, the company retains the searcher’s internet address, the search term and the time of the search. Internet addresses can easily be linked to a household, meaning that any breach of security could be damaging.

Last year, AOL published details of 23 million searches made by 650,000 people over a three-month period. The data included searches made by a Florida man, who on April 16 typed in “My cheating wife” followed by “I want to make my wife suffer” followed by “Kill my wifes [sic] mistress”.

Google’s decision was taken, said Mr Fleischer, “in response to feedback we had from the privacy stakeholder community” — code for criticism of the company’s lack of a clear data protection policy by European regulators and campaigners.

The information retained will still be available to police if required. Google believes that holding the data for up to two years will be enough for any law enforcement requests. “We are not aware of any obligations to hand over data older than that covered by this policy,” Mr Fleischer said.

Google did an estimated 3.3 billion searches in the US alone in January, according to comScore, the internet data provider. On a global basis the search figure could easily top 10 billion in that period, demon-strating the vastness of the company’s information repository.

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