The New York Times and other sources are reporting that Google has been subpoenaed to release Google Trends data pertaining to Florida to assist the defense in an obscenity trial.
If Google complies with the subpoena their release of data may have a long-ranging impact on offline and online social standards in the United States. I’m not sure the courts should allow this data as it cannot in all cases reflect natural searching behaviors.
A considerable amount of automated rank checking occurs every day and I would be surprised to learn that these ranking report toos don’t impact the trends data for some very popular keywords.
It will be interesting to see what happens with this trial.
In other news today, Google’s new AdPlanner service has turned into a direct threat to comScore. Early reports indicate that Google’s AdPlanner will help media buyers target Web sites — some commentators are calling this service the “Pro” version of Google’s Trends for Websites tool.
This news resulted in a 25% loss of value for comScore’s stock today.
Well, I can’t blame investors for assuming Google has a lot of data to play with, but one has to wonder just how much Google’s Supplemental Index distorts their data. After all, since they don’t fully index pages in the Supplemental Results Index, most SRI pages don’t appear in search results.
The compelling need for PageRank just increased by at least one order of magnitude.
Smooth move, Google. Someone better tell Matt Cutts to start hiring additional staff. He’s going to need it once the new link frenzy takes off.
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Lea de Groot 06.24.08 at 7:31 pm
I would have thought that localisation is the biggest barrier - a competent prosecution could play the card of requiring Google to prove that the so-called local data is in fact. My experience of Google’s IP-location match is that it is poor-to-middling, with occasional spurts of excellence (driven, I think, by local ISPs with C-class IP allocations),
Whether that applies in Pensacola or another given locality would be something the defense would have to show.
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