Yahoo announced two days ago its decision to limit the time its archives will keep the information about its clients’ searches. This comes as a direct response to the many concerns raised by privacy advocates, who have been demanding such a measure for quite some time. The decision puts Yahoo on top as the most restrictive major search engine in the United States and it will surely affect Google and Microsoft, as both will have to place their services on the same step or close to their competitor, by shortening the time allowed to keep their users’ information.

Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet appeared extremely pleased with Yahoo’s initiative and called on the rest of online companies to follow its example.

“I urge other leading online companies to match or beat the commitments announced by Yahoo,” Mr. Markey recently stated in a press release.

Up to this point, the company’s policy for keeping the data ensured an archived log for a period of 13 months, while Google continues to keep he details for nine months and Microsoft holds on to the logs for 18 months. The strongest requests were sent from the European area, where the regulators demanded and are actually still asking that the major search engines reduce to six months or less the period of time for holding the personally identifiable information. Microsoft stated that it would consider such an action only if the competition also agreed to it, and so far only Yahoo addressed the issue.

“Microsoft believes that the method of anonymization is more important than the anonymization timeframe and believes all major search engines need to adopt a high standard,” said Brendon Lynch, director of privacy strategy at Microsoft.

Anne Toth, the vice president of policy at Yahoo, explained that the company decided on such a short time period in order to completely “take the issue off the table.” Ms. Toth also added that she hopes the new policy will attract towards Yahoo’s search service many more users interested in their privacy, as from this point of view, at the moment Yahoo delivers the best terms.

Even though the general explanation given when talking about the need of these history logs is that the details are needed in order to provide better services (targeted ads and more relevant searches), Ms. Toth assured the company’s clients that the relatively short 90-day period will not affect the quality of services.

Google did not comment directly on Yahoo’s new policy but stated that it was “continually evaluating” how to balance the services it offered with the privacy of its users.

This security aspect of our everyday Internet use is extremely important and hopefully it won’t take long for the other major players to get involved and find new ways of improving their services without the need to keep tracks on our every move on the Web.