In the upcoming edition of The Atlantic Nicholas Carr suggests that even Google’s biggest fans are finding the far too solicitous company’s latest technology, Google Suggest, more creepy than cuddly:

“Google Suggest, like the similar services offered by other search engines, streamlines the discovery of information. When you click on a suggestion, you arrive at a page of search results, and the accompanying advertisements, a little faster than you would have, had you typed out the query yourself. Google Suggest is technically remarkable. It testifies to the power of cloud computing—the serving-up of software and information from big, distant data centers rather than from a computer’s own hard drive. When I typed that first p, the letter was beamed across the Internet to a Google server in a building hundreds of miles away. The server read the letter, gathered 10 popular search terms beginning with p, and shot the list back to my screen. This intricate data processing took less than a second. It felt magical.

It felt a little creepy, too. Every time Google presents me with search terms customized to what I’m typing, it reminds me that the company monitors my every move. The privacy risks inherent in such long-distance exchanges became apparent in February, when three European researchers revealed that they had used intercepts of some Google Suggest traffic to reconstruct people’s searches. Alerted to the breach, Google quickly added a new layer of security to the transmissions, but the researchers claim that vulnerabilities remain.”

Read the whole article at “Googlethink,” by Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic, July/August 2010