Search Engines User Data

I just read this article Search engines warned over data, and it really makes me mad. Why can't the search engines just use a unique id for each user, using a one-way hash function which cannot be decoded back to the original IP address unless it's brute-forced, which would take years just to get one ip address unless you're the NSA with their alien technology?

Or is the real privacy problem with relating different searches together, and not ip addresses? They could merely be removing ip addresses like they say and not removing your GUID linking the searches together for their relational data.

I hope someone at Google reads this.

Also I doubt Yahoo! has done anything like the article says, and if they have, when why did they give up data on the chinese dissident blogger who is now sitting in jail? It's hypocrisy, and Yahoo!'s privacy reputation is now ruined forever. They are the Micro$oft of search engines.