Bad Google, Good Google

Street View faced opposition from privacy advocates who argue that it infringes civil liberties.

Some attacked it as a "burglar's charter", allowing criminals to look for potential victims over the internet.

Eyewitnesses described how the Google car was followed through the city centre by a panda car with sirens blazing.

“I was just going on my lunch break at work today and I noticed a black car that had stopped at a red light, said Chris Whiteoak, who took the pictures above. "It had a Google sticker on the side, and a large camera 'thing' on the top.

“I decided to pull out my camera phone to take a pic, but just as I did a police car pulled up right behind it and put on its lights and the officer inside was motioning the car to pull over,” he told the Neatorama blog.

“I then realised why, as the car was in the lane to go straight ahead, which was marked ‘bus, bicycle, taxi only’.

A West Yorksire police spokesman confirmed that the Google car had been pulled over on Channing Way in the city but said that no further action had been taken.

According to a blog post on Wednesday, Google will start explaining how it customizes the search results it displays. Google uses its best guess about where you are and sometimes the history of what you searched for in an attempt to provide more relevant results.

Now a small note in the upper-right-hand corner of the results pages will give some clue that this is happening. In one example, the note reads “Customized for the San Francisco metro area.” The text may also have a link to a page that has additional information. In the example of this sort of page, Google showed the Internet Protocol address it used to determine that the search came from San Francisco. It also identified the previous search terms it was taking into account.