Google may not yet be evil, but it is certainly moving further and further down toward that end of the continuum with its extremely poor privacy practices in combination with the almost absurd amount of user data it appears to be logging and storing.
With that in mind, I suspect more services like Scroogle will arise to route around Google’s blase attitude toward user privacy. Scroogle is basically a Google search proxy. Enter your search into Scroogle and it passes it on to Google using one of a small number of IP addresses, so yours is never logged. Scroogle then intercepts the cookie that Google returns and then displays just the actual search results.
Unlike Google which stores user identifiable information about the search for 18 months, Scroogle promises that a) it doesn’t store search terms at all and b) it only maintains logs for a maximum of 48 hours.
I noticed Daniel Brandt, who I’ve criticized in the past for his conspiratorial ways, is listed as one of the directors of the Scroogle effort. It’s nice to see him turn his anti-Google obsession to positive solutions.