Prediction: Google will slap them with a C&D for using their trademark and brand (the word "Google"), which will bring further publicity to this service.
When I started reading, I though it was a genius move being done by Google itself, until I got to the word "they" and then scanned down and saw the Eric Schmidt quote. Yeah, confusing.
They might allow it to stay up for a few days to generate some discussion though... we'll see.
This reduces to the same problem of trusting a single third party with your search queries. If I understand correctly, a corrupt or compromised GoogleSharing proxy could leak your searches. This is not a hypothetical threat. There are already false anonymous proxies deployed and being monitored.
A mix net can address that issue, but then we're just talking about something like Tor.
This is actually a great idea. If Google has a problem with them using their name in the URL then I'm sure they'll make a stink about it, get free press, change it and continue on their merry way.
Google's Chinese users who may be labeled as "subversives" by their government should be using it.
If the Aurora attacks were successful, the next thing the Chinese regime would've done is demand from Google all information about the users it found as subversive: in such a case, the attacks were just to get the right usernames from which to request further information on from Google.
How would users identify which proxies are safe? There are already dishonest proxies being operated with the intent of monitoring who uses them. I think using Tor is safer.
So, give up my trust in the huge corporation that has to answer to their shareholders if they are seen being evil... and instead trust some hacker with nothing to lose if things go tits up?
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/papers/null-prefix-attacks.pdf
and
http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-09/bh-usa-09-archives.ht... http://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-17-archive.h...