Everything you do online gets logged. Every mail you send, every website you visit, every download, and every search. Nobody much cares most of the time, but the data is there. And by “most of the time” we’re talking about way beyond 99.999% of the time. Why do we keep logs? So we can figure out how well we’re doing, and figure out what happened when something goes wrong.

But the devil is in the details, and not everyone that logs is doing it for the betterment of mankind, or even to improve their service to mankind. More worrisome than that is when statist thugs get their hands on the data. There is at least one journalist in prison in China because Yahoo divulged information from their logs. Last year AOL released bulk search logs to researchers and several reporters quickly took a look and were able to track specific searches to specific searchers. The year before, the witlings in the Bush Justice Department demanded bulk data from AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo in hopes of justifying the need for their ineffective Child Online Protection Act, then under constitutional challenge by the ACLU. (AOL, MSN, and Yahoo all admitted turning over some data, allegedly purged of user identification of any kind, Google balked.) If you were searching for Viagra, or the history of nuclear explosives, would you want this known?

Plucky Ask.com, once known as Ask Jeeves, hoping to grow their fourth-place position in the search industry, is betting that you might not. As of today, there is a new item at the upper right corner of the ask.com search window, the text “AskEraser”. Click on it and you can turn the new feature on, which means your search will be deleted as soon as you finish it.

I’m so used to Google (my first choice since I switched from AltaVista years ago, and the choice of about 60% of all searchers) that I doubt I’ll switch. Google and Microsoft purge their search logs after 18 months, Yahoo after 13, I’d be a lot more comfortable if they all purged them after three.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll give Ask.com a spin. I don’t have anything to hide in my searches, but I’m not sure I’d want to have to explain them to anyone either. If I Were King, you can bet there are plenty of folks who would like to know what I was thinking, AskEraser might be a better solution than drawing and quartering those who got too nosy.