That article is misleading and erroneous.
Here's the correct story:
A federal judge denied a U.S. government request that Google Inc. be ordered to hand over a sample of keywords customers use to search the Internet, but required on Friday that the company produce some Web addresses indexed in its system.
In a 21-page ruling, Judge James Ware of the U.S. District for the Northern District of California said the privacy considerations of Google users led him to deny part of the Justice Department's request.
"To the extent the motion seeks an order compelling Google to disclose search queries of its users the motion is denied," Ware wrote.
During a court hearing on Tuesday the government reduced the number of Google searches it wanted data on to just 50,000 Web addresses and roughly 5,000 search terms from the millions or potentially billions of addresses it had initially sought.
"The court grants the government's motion to compel only as to the sample of 50,000 URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), from Google's search index," the judge ruled, referring to the searchable catalog of documents that form the core of Google's Web search service, the most widely used in the world.
"What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies," Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel, said in a statement on the company's Web site. The full comment is at
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/.
Ware ruled that the 50,000 Web addresses, or URLs, were a relevant request by the government, which wants the data for a statistical study it is doing to show the effectiveness of filtering software at issue in a separate case -- ACLU v. Gonzales -- that concerns a federal law on online child pornography.
"The expectation of privacy by some Google users may not be reasonable, but may nonetheless have an appreciable impact on the way in which Google is perceived, and consequently the frequency with which users use Google," Ware wrote.
"This concern, combined with the prevalence of Internet searches for sexually explicit material ... gives this court pause as to whether the search queries themselves may constitute potentially sensitive information," he said.
In his decision, Judge Ware wrote of the "three vital interests" that needed to be weighed in the case: national interest, proprietary business information and privacy concerns.
"This Court is particularly concerned any time enforcement of a subpoena imposes an economic burden on a non-party," he wrote in a filing made at the close of business of Friday.