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However, Google's commercial ambitions rest firmly on it acquiring a massive amount of information on its users and cookies play a key part in the group's efforts to “personalise” its services for individual consumers.

In May, Eric Schmidt, the Google chief executive, said that the company did not yet “know enough about you” and was stepping up its efforts to collect personal information on the web.

He added that the world’s biggest internet search engine was still at a “very early” stage of gathering your personal data through the web.

"This is the most important aspect of Google's expansion,” he said.

Mr Schmidt envisaged a day when Google would be able to advise its users on everything from their career moves to how they should spend their free time, based on the stored records of queries they tap into Google.com.

Google already holds a vast amount of personal information about its users, ranging from the contents of e-mail (from its Gmail service) to credit card details (through Google Checkout, its online payment system).

The information is held in a vast network of massive “server farms”, the company's fleet of digital data centres into which it is estimated to have pumped billions of dollars.

Jim Harper, a privacy specialist, wrote on the Technology Liberation Front website that “credit is due [to Google] for announcing a privacy-improving change to its cookie policy”.

However, he added: “Google’s change doesn’t tame the cookie monster, of course. A cookie reissued every two years until 2038 and beyond has the same tracking power as a cookie expiring 31 years hence. But rare users of Google rightly should be ‘forgotten’ by Google in two years.

“As important as the substance of the new cookie policy, Google is talking about their information practices and the effects their practices have on privacy. What other company does even that?”

Explaining the move on the official Google blog, Peter Fleischer, the group’s global privacy counsel, said: “After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies — as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time. And this is why we’re announcing a new cookie policy.”

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