Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Centre for Democracy and Technology in America said: "This is an extremely positive development."
Governments could still, however, force Google to keep information and to hand it over to them so whilst it is a move in the right direction for what the privacy groups want to see there is still cause for their concern.
Peter Fleischer, from Google’s European privacy counsel, explained that the company had made the decision after consulting with privacy organisations in the US and Europe.
Google collects and stores data from each query. It holds information such as the search term itself, the unique address of the PC being used, known as the IP address, and details of how a user makes searches, such as the browser used and previous queries to Google.
That information can contain private data about a user, and could be used to build a detailed picture of the user's habits or lifestyle.
Privacy groups are concerned about how the data collected by Google - and other web firms - could be used to monitor people's online habits.
