Just catching up here. By order issued Friday, Judge Ware directed Google to produce the list of 50,000 URLs requested by the government (whittled down from its previous request for all), but not the search queries DOJ had also asked for.

Judge Ware held that given the limited explanation of the government's planned use of the information, the two requests were "duplicative." As search queries were more likely to implicate both Google trade secrets and user privacy, those were dropped.

Interestingly, the court reviewed user privacy concerns independent of the goodwill concerns Google had raised, although that examination was not necessary to its ruling.

[S]earch queries themselves may constitute potentially sensitive information. ... Even though counsel for the Government assured the Court that the information received will only be used for the present litigation, it is conceivable that the Government may have an obligation to pursue information received for unrelated litigation purposes under certain circumstances regardless of the restrictiveness of a protective order. The Court expressed this concern at oral argument as to queries such as "bomb placement white house," but queries such as "communist berkeley parade route protest war" may also raise similar concerns.