Reuter reports that Google will anonymize search data records after 18 to 24 months. Such data can potentially be used to identify individuals .

The objective is to to bolster “consumer privacy protections”. Previously Google kept this data for as long as it found it “useful”.

The Norwegian Data Inspectorate lately investigated Google as part of a larger study of Norwegian search engines. Directorates in other countries have also raised concern about the Google storage policy, Google’s Peter Fleischer says to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

Google is now trying to accommodate these institutions.

The argument for keeping such data in the first place is that Google would like to tailor the search to the searchers’ needs. In other worlds: Google need such data to personalize search results and make them more relevant to the searcher. By keeping track of searches, Google may identify the main interests of that person and streamline search engine results accordingly.

This personalization policy is also Google’s secret weapon against search engine result spamming. It is hard to spam your way to the top of search engine results, when the results vary from person to person.

Aftenposten also points to EU regulations that actually demand that such data should be stored for some time in order to help police in their criminal investigations.

According to Reuters Google also says it will be taking additional steps to design privacy protections into Google products. The Google Talk instant message system will for instance get an “off the record” feature that will disable the automatic archiving of conversations.