Google Avoids Surrendering Search Info

Mercury News has details of a San Francisco judge's decision that Google should give the DoJ some details on its search engine, but is not required to turn over records to the government. From the article: "McElvain emphasized the study would be more meaningful if it included search requests processed by Google, which by some estimates fields nearly half of all online queries in the United States. Ware concurred with the Justice Department on that point, writing in his order that 'the government's study may be significantly hampered if it did not have access to some information from the most often used search engine.' But Ware said the government didn't clearly explain why it needed a list of search requests to conduct its study, prompting him to conclude the Web site addresses would be adequate." Reaction to the news is available on the Google Blog.

Note to DoJ

[ChristopherX]

If you want to determine if filters are protecting children from porn... 1. Go to google.com, search for "porn", etc. 2. Click on the first 1000 results to determine if each is evil. 3. Turn on your filtering software. 4. Go back to step 1, repeat for each filter you are interested in. Alternatively, waste tax payer money and look like an ass by paying lawyers to try to bully information out of private companies.

Re:DoJ Note to self.

[xiando]

"In future if you need a list of website, it will be easier to code a webspider than going around suing search engines".

It would be great if that was anywhere even remotely close to true. As pointed out in another post and in an article I wrote in January, Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online all turned over the records asked for without question. Google was the only one who actually put up a fight... Think about it. Only one of all the corporations asked for records refused. The rest "bent over" immediately.

Re:Can't Troll the E-Water

[ionpro]

Google didn't contest the information they were required to hand over. It was a random sampling of 50,000 webpages from their database of billions, not tied to any particular search term. That's the reason the judge had no problem in letting the government have it.

Quibble on a side issue

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>The Federal government was here to protect the rights of the people by making sure that the individual states didn't trample on these rights.

The idea of the federal government protecting people from the states is a post-Civil War innovation. Reading the Federalist Papers is an eye opener. The Founders actually envisioned the exact opposite, that the central government couldn't trample the people's rights because the power of sovereign state governments would prevent them.

Use Scroogle

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are concerned about Google's records of your searches, use Scroogle (http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html [scroogle.org]) instead.

Re:Thank god ... (P2P search engines)

[mikael]

Could you imagine the implications if they had to turn this data over? Every minor study in the country would be trolling Google for user information.


And developers would probably write their own P2P web search engines. Napster did the keyword search for mp3 files. It would be trivial to modify this for web page searches - each filename would be replaced by a keyword string, while spider searches would be implemented through distributed processing.

If the Feds really want to find a list of IP addresses looking for a particular keyword string, all they have to do is set up a webpage with these keywords in it. For registered advertisers, google provides webpage owners to retrieve list of IP addresses and the matching keywords that made a hit to that site.

Re:Can't Troll the E-Water

[jadavis]

Conservative justices are generally thought to be strict constructionists. That would imply that they would assume the government did not have the power to request that unless it was spelled out in the Constitution.

From watching John Roberts a little, I would classify him as a strict constructionist, but not nearly like Scalia or Thomas. Alito, I just don't know.

The justices that are more likely to side against GOOG would be someone like Kennedy or Souter. But that's just my prediction.

The big secret is that Scalia and Thomas are the friends of liberals and conservatives alike. Of course they are an enemy to the Democrats, but a friend to anyone with libertarian leanings. Remember Kelo vs. New London where a local government tried to use Eminent Domain to take property from the individuals and transfer it to a private company? The justices that voted against it (minority) were: Rhenquist, Scalia, Thomas, and O'Connor. The justices that thought that a private company should be able to take away land from individuals for private benefit were: Souter, Breyer, Stevens, Ginsberg, and Kennedy.

Plenty of legal basis

[JohnQPublic]

If he *really* had some common sense, he would've said, in essence, "there's no legal basis for requiring Google to hand out *any* data if there's not a criminal investigation going on, so go away, n00bs".

You forgot the obvious "but IANAL". There is lots of legal basis for requiring Google to hand out data when there's no criminal investigation going on. In fact, there's an entire section of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that deals with obtaining information during a civil suit from someone who isn't a party to the suit. It happens all the time, and it's supposed to be possible.

You can argue until the cows come home whether or not the DoJ needed the specific information they asked for, but the fact is that there is a legal basis for the decision, and under the FRCP, Judge Ware seems to have made a reasonable decision.

Re:What's the difference between Google and the Go

[Money for Nothin']

Credit card companies know what you buy and where.

No they don't. Look at your statements: the individual *items* purchased are not listed. Only the merchant name (and perhaps address) is, along with the transaction price, of course.

CC companies do not, in fact, know what specific items you are purchasing (at least not yet). Guesses can be made based on the merchant (e.g. "Big Al's Sex Toy Shop - Atlanta, GA" might tell the CC company a bit about your sex habits), but they won't know that you purchased a black, 24" triple-ended model from RubberCo...