It's not my job to look out for Google's interests. "You're the product, not the customer," remember? Why should I concern myself with the quality of Google's product?
Why? I doubt it has any negative impact on Google if a tiny fraction of their users go through a proxy, and I'm having trouble thinking of another reason to oppose doing so.
I'm not sure that's true, but in any case, being tracked is the price you pay for using Google.
The way I see it, there are three options:
* Accept it and keep using Google
* Use DuckDuckGo, Bing or some other search engine
* Struggle to use hacks like Scroogle
Tracking users is a key part of Google's business model. If you use their services, they're going to track you and target ads to you. And they're going to keep implementing things like throttling to frustrate sites like Scroogle.
the disconnect extension http://disconnect.me/ includes an option to depersonalize searches (which seems to work by killing google's cookies).
there's also http://www.googlesharing.net/ which is an anonymizing proxy service, but i think it's firefox specific.
personally, i just stopped using their other services (i tried disconnect, but vaguely remember various issues when otherwise logged in) - as far as i know, they don't track you when you're not logged in (to be more sure i also use ghostery - that, together with disconnect, prevents a lot of tracking).
Not just IP address but also browser signature, screen size and resolution, javascript settings and anything else in the HTTP header. See http://browserspy.dk/ for details.
yes, i know (and also browser fingerprinting if they really wanted to), but do they do that? as far as i know, they do not (likely for various reasons - bad press, confusion of people behind NATs, etc).
[i mean, more exactly, that i have heard nothing about them updating personal information with data from searches when not logged in; i am not talking aggregate info like typical searches from geoip locations]