Sorry, just avoiding finishing off the great work. And it appears I’ve missed stories about prostitution (and the opportunity to give Bindel a fisking), equal pay and all sorts of other nonsense which I usually like to blog about.
What I didn’t miss was the story about Google refusing to submit to a subpoena from the US government. Garry, amongst others, has suggested this is a matter of privacy, and praises Google for doing the right thing.
John Battelle, who has probably forgotten more about the mighty Russian search machine than most of us could ever know, begs to differ. He points out it’s rather a matter of commercial confidentiality. The subpoena actually asks for..
” asks Google to produce an electronic file containing ‘[a]ll URL’s that are available to be located through a query on your company’s search engine as of July 31 2005…
“all queries that have been entered on your company’ search engine between June 1, 2005 and July 31, 2005.”
Giving over that information would give a rather large helping to understand how much of the net Google indexes, how it goes about it, etc. Battelle doesn’t go this far, but that information could potentially be of substantial use to other companies seeking to, say, launch their own search engines or improve the ones they currently have.
(entertaining that Google also has to PAY to collect this information–and excellent use of the legal device of ‘we can’t prove you’re guilty of anything, but by forcing you to gather your defence, we’re hoping to bankrupt you anyway.’)
I’d agree that there’s a strong element of business self-interest in Google’s refusal to cooperate. To be fair, going back to the BBC story I linked to, the people at Google don’t appear to be making a big secret of that element of it:
Google has also said that providing the data would make its users think it was willing to reveal personal information about them, as well as giving competitors access to trade secrets.
Fair play to them, I reckon.
Having said that, it would be better if Google had a few decent competitors. They do seem to be heading in Microsoft’s direction these days.
Comment by Garry — January 22, 2006 @ 9:14 pm