MatthewHSE - 9:41 pm on Jan 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

What interests me is that if this data will be used in a court of law as evidence, then it becomes a public record. In other words, we will be entitled to a copy of the raw search query data ourselves

Aha! I hadn't thought of that. I knew there had to be some reason other than privacy that Google chose this fight.