Wired put together in one story all the collective hand-wringing going on about search engines accreting more and more personal information on individuals. Search engines began as services providing complete anonymity for users, but nowadays those same companies also offer a wide range of other, more personal, services ranging from free email accounts to indexing entire personal hard drives.

Importantly, some of them are using tracking cookies across these services, raising fears that those searches might not be anonymous anymore. A director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told Wired that Google "will supplant Microsoft as the company that has its finger on the infrastructure of our data," which almost guarantees Google's legal department more late nights in the coming quarters.

Interestingly, Wired asked Google how it employs tracking cookies across its growing list of services, and the search engine declined to answer.