How many people would think twice about using Google if they saw this quote from the Monster of Mountain View's CEO on its home page?
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
Actually, Mr. Schmidt, as far as we know, you keep that “information” indefinitely. You can claim you delete search logs at some point, but we have no idea of knowing if that's true.
A Mozilla veteran community coordinator of Firefox marketing projects, reacting to Schmidt's comments, suggests that Firefox users ditch Google for Microsoft's Bing. (Bing is one of the alternative search engines we suggest using instead of Google).
It's nice to see that there's someone at Mozilla who takes a dim view of Google's awful business practices and lack of privacy safeguards.