Info, Info, Info

U.S. Limits Demands on Google

By KATIE HAFNER
Published: March 15, 2006

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 14 — After the Justice Department drastically reduced its request for information from Google, a federal judge said on Tuesday that he intended to approve at least part of that request.

The government first subpoenaed Web data from Google last August, as part of its defense of an online pornography law.

At a hearing in Federal District Court here, Judge James Ware said that in supporting the government's more limited request, he would nonetheless pay attention to Google's concerns about its trade secrets and the privacy of its users.

The government is now requesting a sample of 50,000 Web site addresses in Google's index instead of a million, which it was demanding until recently. And it is asking for just 5,000 search queries, compared with an earlier demand for an entire week of queries, which could amount to billions of search terms.

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