Concurring Opinions has the best summary of The Google Subpoena Case I've seen. I was confused by the initial reports that said a government victory and then later reports that said a Google victory. This posting explains it all.
Google was subpoenaed to produce it's complete index of sites and all the search queries entered over a 2 month period. When Google balked, the government narrowed it's request a few times to 50,000 URLs indexed and only 5,000 queries. The government claimed a human would browse through the data and be able to "estimate . . . the aggregate properties of the websites that search engines have indexed". Now that sounds lame to me and it sounded lame to the court which called the description "incomplete".
"Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26, a subpoena may be quashed if the 'burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit.'"
"The court concluded that the goverment did not need both the URL samples and the search queries, and it required only the disclosure of the URL samples but not the search queries. The court concluded that 'the marginal burden of loss of trust by Google's users based on Google's disclosure of its users' search queries to the Government outweighs the duplicative disclosure's likely benefit to the Government's study.'"
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