Heck, Google Talk doesn't even feature a box to let you search for things, as rival products from AOL, MSN and Yahoo do.

Search engines compile a lot of data on what we search for and much of what we search for is personal. Many people fear that the government wants to do data mining. It'll be interesting to see how much of all this ultimately becomes a political issue.

Microsoft's problem is that despite having all this stuff, they haven't really budged their share of search.

They definitely have a market, because they have the traffic. Search marketers can't seem to get enough traffic. I don't know anyone who is not going to try MSN.

Every major search engine has some form of paid placement.

AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo did not violate the privacy of any user by handing over this information. No private data was revealed. Nevertheless, by not pushing back against such a bad request for data, it leaves open the real fear that they might not push back if the US government decided to go on a real fishing expedition in the future. Privacy may not have been lost but trust was.