Google Subpoena Woes Double

If Google does not succeed in fending off Gonzalez v Google, the ACLU said it would have to ask for the same information the government requested. As a party fighting the government in a Pennsylvania court over the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act, the ACLU would have no choice but to perform discovery of Google's inner workings, the organization said in a where it called DOJ "uninformed" about how search engines work. That response contained a number of declarations from Matt Cutts, the well-known Google engineer and likely the most expert person on how the search engine functions. Google claimed providing DOJ with the information it requested would open up its trade secrets to the competition: An analysis of Google's query data would reveal proprietary information such as the number of queries that Google can or does process, its capabilities of processing certain lengths and types of queries, its market share in the United States and other countries, and even the demographics of its users. Competition with Google is fierce. Google's competitors could use Google's confidential query data to manipulate their search engines to accommodate Web users and run queries similar to Google's. If Google's competitors were to access this information, they could conform their size and crawling metrics to Google's, thereby generating search results that mimic Google's and competing more effectively with Google. document.write("Email Murdok here.") Drag this to your Bookmarks. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.