Yahoo just agreed to store peoples’ search histories for only 90 days. Google had slashed its time to 9 months. And Microsoft says it will reduce theirs to 6 months if Google does too. If these search engines were using data retention as a way to compete for consumers concerned about their privacy I’d be cheering for this. This is just how competition is supposed to happen—each company offers a better deal to consumers, until the companies can’t do any better.

Unfortunately, I suspect most consumers care more about how good the search results are they get on a day to day basis than the possibility that someone will release their silly or sordid search histories. Google insists that it needs the data just for that reason and it is hard to see that they’d be storing it just for the heck of it. And Microsoft and Yahoo apparently thought so too.

My guess is that what we are seeing is, these search engine companies pandering to the press and to the regulators. If I’m right, the quality of search results will suffer—and the search engines won’t even have the ability to engage in research and look for innovations that require long search histories. I’m not exonerating Google and its smaller siblings in this. They should have made it known to its searchers that they were storing their results for a very long time and told them what they were going to do with them and perhaps even have given consumers the ability to opt out of having their data stored.

But, after being transparent about what they are doing, consumers should vote with their clicks—use the search engine that gives them the right balance of privacy and search quality. Instead, my fear is that search engines are going to engage in a contest to tacitly agree to fix the length of data retention to get the regulators off their backs. In the end, that will be bad for consumers.