John Battelle did some digging for a reader who wondered whether Google (and search engines in general) could easily match search terms with IP addresses, and vice versa. Here are the questions Battelle bounced off his contacts at Google:
- “Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google cookie value?”
- “Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?”
The answer for both questions was “yes”.
MichaelZimmer.org 