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The privacy policy and terms of service of the hosting company should always be read carefully. 

Major search engines have said they need to retain personal data, in part, to provide better services, to thwart security threats, to keep people from gaming search ranking results, and to combat click fraud scammers. However, major search engines often have retained this data for over a year, seemingly well beyond the time frame necessary to address these concerns. Recently, some search engines have reduced the time that they retain users' IP addresses

It's a good idea to avoid using the same web site for both your web-based email and as your search engine.  Web email accounts will always require some type of a login, so if you use the same site as your search engine, your searches can be connected to your email account.