This is orders of magnitude less compute/bandwidth-intensive than checking every internet search. That would be markedly insane, and I doubt the world has enough CPU power/money/political will to pull that off.
I don't think this is even close to being true. It'd be relatively trivial in terms of compute power for google to, say, generate a list of everyone who ever searched the word "tor". The trickier part would be correlating with your real-world identity, but google is already doing that just so it can advertise to you better, so I'd say not only is this not insane, I'd say it's already being done: you're already on that list as soon as you do the search, and it's just a question of who has access to it, and whether "The list of everyone searching for tor" would be too many people to be useful. If some federal agency wants a list of everyone who ever searched for "tor", it's only a matter of whether they can get google to turn over that information. The compute power required is trivial.
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Notes -
I don't think this is even close to being true. It'd be relatively trivial in terms of compute power for google to, say, generate a list of everyone who ever searched the word "tor". The trickier part would be correlating with your real-world identity, but google is already doing that just so it can advertise to you better, so I'd say not only is this not insane, I'd say it's already being done: you're already on that list as soon as you do the search, and it's just a question of who has access to it, and whether "The list of everyone searching for tor" would be too many people to be useful. If some federal agency wants a list of everyone who ever searched for "tor", it's only a matter of whether they can get google to turn over that information. The compute power required is trivial.
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