The attempt by Justice Department lawyers to gain access to Google search data may have opened an important new front in the war over the security of personal data online. The search powers have generated amazing amounts of revenue for themselves and their shareholders simply by linking ads to the terms users enter for a general search. But sustaining that revenue growth into the future, the industry believes, requires offering users more personalization and more interrelated services, and giving advertisers increasingly better ways to target their ads both demographically and eventually by searcher behavior.
That makes it a business necessity to build ever bigger databases of where users go, what they click on, and how they act on the Internet even when they
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