Ask.com allows erasing of past searches

Once, there was the thought that all the searches that you made were not anything to be worried about; that thought did not last very long as it became clear that search engines were storing searches along with information. Fine, but even then a person does not know who are you - after all, your name and address are not revealed. And then there was research done on the basis of using the various searches conducted by the same computer, and enough information was able to be extracted that the actual address and person could be found. During this time, the question of privacy came to be raised more and more, and there was increasing pressure on search engines to modify their search archival to address privacy concerns.
And now search provider Ask.com has thrown the gauntlet much further. It has announced a feature called AskEraser that seeks to project an image of handling customer-privacy concerns by allowing users to set that their searches on Ask.com be deleted from the company's servers:

When enabled by the user, the feature will completely delete search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers -- including IP addresses, user IDs, session IDs and the text of queries made, according to the company. In most cases, the deletion will take place within a few hours of the time a search is completed, the company said.
But there are important caveats to keep in mind, Chester said, Ask.com, for instance, will still collect and store user search data by default, unless the user specifically enables AskEraser, Chester said. And enabling AskEraser does nothing to prevent third parties with whom Ask.com has relationships from collecting and storing search data.

There are some exceptions, but this is a further movement in the area of search engines being more concerned about privacy. One wonders as to whether Google will react to this move in some way, after all, Google is seen as the market leader in search, and it needs to not be concerned about the privacy of its users. At the same time, Google has made change only after some amount of pressure in the past through privacy experts and through the media.