Google will have to open some of its Internet files for the U.S Justice Department, after beeing order by a californian judge.

The judge is extremely cautious about forcing Google to turn over what users enter into the search engine. The government scaled back its request of information, which led to U.S. District Judge James Ware agreeing to open some of the files for the DOJ.

Google's strong protests have forced the government to scale back its request to a random samping of 50,000 web site addresses and the text of 5,000 random search requests. Only 10,000 of the web sites and 1,000 of the search requests will be analyzed by the government.

The judge said he didn't want to do anything to create the perception that Internet search engines and other large online databases could become tools for government surveillance. He seemed less concerned about requiring Google to supply the government with a random list of Web sites indexed by the company.

This news article was written on March 15, 2006, quoting Mercury News.