Decius wrote:
] Google should not save all 4 octets of your IP address.
] They should store a SHA1 hash of the last 2 octets so they
] can identify unique visitors without storing identifying data.

Of course, a SHA1 hash of two octets is completely reversible by brute force, so this doesn't really offer any strong form of protection, does it? It seems to be little more than obfuscation.

If this really mattered to us we would onion route our Google queries or pass them through a Crowd. Of course, "Tor" is the newest Swiss Army knife that everyone is talking about but no one is using.

RE: Scraping and ad-stripping Google's results