What are the risks of using search engines?

What are the risks of using search engines?
One of the risks is being able to spell the words you want to search or. The word 'sidneee' will find out a different answer to the word 'sydney'. This may sound silly to some people until you try and read some of the questions put on this site. A person has read your question and a person is typing on a computer keyboard in order to answer your question. If you use a web based search engine then you get lots of possible answers which you then have to read through to see if it actually answers you question


>> Risks or pitfalls?
True risks, well not many in practice. Probably the worst is clicking on a Sponsored Link" on Google thinking it's a proper hit. You may waste a bit of time that way. Of course if you're worried about confidentiality, there are hazards. Your ISP keeps logs, Google keeps logs. But you'd have to be pretty paranoid to worry about Google reporting you for looking up something naughty and Mr Plod arriving to drag you away. Bush's administration wanted to introduce monitoring for the entire 'net so you might be investigated if you looked up "How to make explosives" but I doubt whether even during times of great tension anyone would act on something as simple as that alone. After all, lots of us look up information about illegal things just out of curiosity with no intention of actually doing anything. What is more risky is visiting the sites that come up if you don't keep your computer properly protected. That's a subject in itself.