Alltheweb.com seems to already be doing what Google is doing now too. Basically, if the US Government is one of the trusted partners of Yahoo!, and if Yahoo! and the USgov have a confidentiality agreement, it will be legal for Yahoo! to send the information they collect on you to the USgov.

And then there's always government spying equipment.

After all, they gather information to know if you are a threat and how to stop you from being one...often they resort to visible harassment to get you so paranoid that you stop yourself from doing what they would otherwise be powerless to stop. Anything else would require arrests, roundups, and assassination -- the first you can avoid by being smart, the second you can sense ahead of time, and the third requires metaphysical protective measures.

My protocol is to be careful enough to avoid getting thrown in jail, but daring enough to plow right through the scare tactics. That means being careful in the causal realm (3D, laws, physics, collisions, violence) and absolutely driven in the acausal realm (metaphysical laws, psychology, emotions, hyperdimensional barriers, reality engineering, liberating knowledge, intent/meditation/prayer, positive awareness, destiny). The second takes precedence over the first and metaphysical laws can override lower ones when necessary.

So another point behind visible monitoring is to get you into a scattered fear state so that you cannot reach the spiritual safeground where higher laws take over and protect you from the law of the jungle.

The way I see it, time is limited and the job must be done as efficiently and timely as possible, so let them monitor all they want and by the time they finally have crunched enough data to know when, where, and how to spring an ambush, we won't be there.

As for search engines, there are other ones like http://www.alltheweb.com that work well ... you can also access google through a proxy.

Yet another solution would be to simply stop caring that "they" know what you are doing, and just continue to produce happiness (or positive loosh, or however you want to call it).

Well yeah, that's what I was going to say.   I mean, who cares if they know what sites we go to or not?  It doesn't affect anything.  Unless you're up to illegal activities (kiddie porn, terrorism - real terrorism -  etc.) then really, why worry?  Let 'em gather information.   I know some people feel that it's the principle of it, which I can understand, but the other view is that we have to realize with something like the internet, of course the gov't will want to spy and get involved.   It's the risk we agree to take and the game we agree to play everytime we log onto the 'net.

On the other hand, from an global elite perspective, they can probably gather all your internet traffic anyway so in that aspect perhaps nothing has really changed (they already knew what sites you accessed in addition to what you searched for), it has only perhaps become slightly more efficient for them to gather information specifically on your search behaviour.

Yet another solution would be to simply stop caring that "they" know what you are doing, and just continue to produce happiness (or positive loosh, or however you want to call it).