To find out what kind of information the four major search companies retain about their users, CNET News.com surveyed America Online, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

The following set of 7 questions were asked to representatives of each company:

1) What information do you record about searches? Do you store IP addresses linked to search terms and types of searches (image vs. Web)?
2) Given a list of search terms, can you produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or cookie value?
3) Have you ever been asked by an attorney in a civil suit to produce such a list of people? A prosecutor in a criminal case?
4) Given an IP address or cookie value, can you produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?
5) Have you ever been asked by an attorney in a civil suit to produce such a list of search terms? A prosecutor in a criminal case?
6) Do you ever purge these data, or set an expiration date of, for instance, two years or five years?
7) Do you ever anticipate offering search engine users a way to delete that data?

Read the complete results and responses of each companyhere