I don't think that merely using a search engine is dangerous. I don't consider any of the information that I put in the search box to be personal, in the same way that my name, address, SS#, etc., are personal. Choosing a search engine is essentially choosing the lesser evil, and my Yahoo! and Gmail accounts are under an alias. I like the Chromium browser engine, but I use a flavor of it that isn't full of Google's spyware.
What I've mostly been railing about in this thread is tracking cookies and pervasive advertising networks, which are easy enough to block - something that I think everyone should do. If we take the profit out of tracking, privately-owned companies stop doing it.
Again, i reference the
aol search data leak. I get your point by trying to do something to try to put yourself under the radar for simply something about the invasion of privacy. But plopping in your own name for ****s and giggles is rather personal info to be pumping through a search engine. Lest search engines find out that there's a name behind the ip address your isp gave you. Anything you search, the company will be able to find out about a lot about you, even if they don't ever find out who you are. Search engines may even be able to deduce who you are just from what you searched. Read the aol search data leak situation; it's all about what you can do with nothing other than search results. What you type into a search engine and what happens to that, you beg to think how paranoid are you? I can say that i'm definitely more paranoid than you on this whole entire matter.
Honestly, it's not Google that I'm worried about. I admit that they're been (fairly) responsible with the absolutely massive amount of information that they have. But if you were to install Ghostery, you'd suddenly see that Google isn't the only one. Who the heck is Quantcast? Federated Media? Comscore? What will THOSE companies do with the browsing information they collect? I'm trying not to sound too reactionary or paranoid. I, personally, just don't like the idea of so many companies having free reign to gather whatever information they feel like. I'm content with just taking myself off of the grid, as it were, but I do sometimes feel that other people are doing themselves a disservice by having their information easily accessible to anyone. Run a Google search on your name and see what comes up. When I tell people to do this, the reaction to the results is usually something like this: 
I don't see that it matters who totally who gets information about you on the web so much as information about you is being captured, kept, and something then happens with it. Then again, my actual name doesn't pull up much on google except for one link for my old highschool, a lot for people who have the same name, and a lot of suggested links for searching for person of same name at mylife or eharmony.
I'm not terribly surprised that my name doesn't pull up anything more than my old highschool and people with same name since i am fairly careful about what i sign up for and use mostly aliases to protect myself (my friends consider me sort of crazy in this area since i do use aliases in real life if i happen to meet people that i gauge should definitely not know who i am). I am also not a very big presence on the web compared to the likes of chris crocker or maddox.
You're average dumbass on the internet will have their name pop up (with search results actually being about them) a lot more because most people don't like to read EULA's and other fine print of which i do. It's much better to not sign up for anything where in the fine print that you actually do not agree with. A lot of this problem is caused by people signing up for things with their real information on stuff they don't read the intricate details about. Sign up with fake info or don't at all. I also don't get any spam in my inbox because i don't hardly sign up for **** and am careful with the circulation of my email (the address i use here is for circulating, and really hlp spams me every now and again if someone sent me a pm, but this is a slight derail in what i'm talking about....).
Most of these companies capturing such information in massive data mining use it to make more money, become more effective at their business, etc., and other companies will sell such data mining information to other companies for the same result. I'm sure there's other things less innocent intentioned, but these other details don't really matter if they are unknown. Simply, it's still data mining for your information for god knows what purpose innocent intentioned or not (the fact that it even happens is what ticks people off).
You could all get a wild hair up your asses and run your computer more securely too. I don't need to worry about certain other things because i don't run as administrator ever. You find out less about someone who controls what goes in and out of their computer via firewall, web habits, and not running as administrator.
Cookies is another thing too. I have my browser settings setup to never remember history, never remember passwords, and wipe out cookies upon closing the program (i don't like people know where i've been if my computer needs to be used by someone else for a little bit, i also find temporary use of cookies to be handy). I don't want to manage which sites i enable or disable cookies, javascript, flash, and whatever else out there on a constant case by case basis. Everything is a fresh start when i close my browser. I could probably be running a more secure browser than firefox, but i'm lazy since it came preinstalled and works pretty darn good in my security conscious from the ground up operating system that is linux (i'm not bashing windows, it just helps to setup passworded accounts, set an admin password, leave UAC on, and use a standard user account for everything; that's really all windows users need to do to match the powerful basic default security settings in linux).
Twentypercentcooler, you just need to deal with datamining happening, or don't use a search engine of any kind. Which brings up another great issue of that your isp knows waaaay more about you than any search engine. And we all have our flaws in how we conduct being under the radar on the web (i know mine), but really, there's no escaping data mining. That's not to practically say it's agreeing that people are ok with companies getting rid of privacy, but that we definitely have no control over it, or even escape from it on the internet (the internet was made without encryption in mind (as to say encryption is only available when and where offered), anyone can data mine anyone with a data packet sniffer, it was bound to happen eventually where the internet would evolve into a big thing where many have started businesses in mining data).
