I’ve always been interested in Google searches. They can drive a lot of traffic to your site, and for unexpected reasons. My blog entry, ”I've always wanted a smoking jacket!” has brought over 5,000 people to my site. Toomre.com is getting a lot of hits on people searching for information about Anshul Rustagi, the CDO trader recently dismissed from Deutsche Bank.

So, the news that the Feds are after Google data as highlighted in Richard’s Notes caught me interest.

The article says, “The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.”

The article goes on to say that “The law was struck down in 2004 because it was too broad”. Hmm. Better not search on “broad”, the Feds will want to know if you are looking for porn. Likewise, “breast”. I’m sure that my wife has searched on that topic several times as she has visited the epicurean websites for new recipes for chicken breasts. I’ve search on that topic myself more than once since a few of my friends are fighting breast cancer, and I’ve even had people come to this blog based on searches about breast cancer.

Then, of course there are all the “dolls”, especially around Christmas and around Fiona’s birthday. Since I search for terms like “broad”, “breast” and “doll” and talk about my children, I’m sure I must show up on the child pornography radar.

More significantly, the article quotes Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant, as saying, “`The government can't even claim that it's for national security”.

No, we all know that the government doesn’t ask judicial permission to seek out information related to national security. As an aside, there is the story from 2003 of a person who was ejected from a plane for wearing a “Suspected Terrorist” button.

The message from that post was that way people are treated as they get on airlines is that they are all suspected of being terrorists. I’m sure that by using the phrase “suspected terrorist” as well as doing a Google search on the subject, I am showing up on the radar not only as a suspected child pornographer, but also as a suspected terrorist.

Now, of course if you make your searches very specific, for example instead of searching for ‘breast’, searching for ‘chicken breast lemon artichoke’ you will get better recipes and make it clear you are not searching for pornography.

Of course, what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and perhaps the Federal government needs to be refine its searches as well.