On Wednesday, search engine Yahoo! Inc informed that it will cut to three months the time it stores personal data gathered from web surfing, making its retention policy the shortest among peers.

The computer addresses of the users would be anonymized by the company within three months in most cases, from a prior standard of 13 months. There is a chance that fraud or system security is involved, so the company is reserving the right to keep data for up to six months.

It has been learnt that pressure has been planted on the Internet search companies by the European and other data protection officials as they advise them to do more to protect the privacy of users.

Ari Schwartz, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group said, “Yahoo's pledge is significant because they are getting rid of some data after 90 days and they actually have an implementation plan to get this done.”

Other than this, the scope of the data is also being expanded by the company, which is making it anonymous, to include page and advertisement clicks and views, from just search log data alone.

It has been advised by the European Union that companies keep data no more than six months and urged the sector to adopt an industry-wide standard.  

Yahoo vice president of policy and privacy Chief Anne Toth said, “This was our attempt to put a stake in the ground on the issue.”

The revenues are acquired by the Internet search engines by matching the advertisements to the searches, so advertisers can peg their ads to what is on the searcher's mind.