Google’s head of Search warned a federal court that forcing the company to share its search index, ranking data, and live results with competitors would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to Google, its users, and the open web.
The warning appears in a filed affidavit from Elizabeth Reid, Google’s vice president and head of Search, submitted with Google’s motion to pause key antitrust remedies while it appeals the final judgment in the DOJ search monopoly case.
The filing spells out what Google sees as its most sensitive Search assets and why sharing them would expose proprietary systems, enable reverse engineering, and fuel spam.
Disclosure of Google’s web search index
The fight: Section IV of the final judgment would force Google to give “qualified competitors” a one-time dump of its core web index data at marginal cost. That data would include:
- Every URL in Google’s web search index
- A DocID-to-URL map
- Crawl timing data
- Spam scores
- Device-type flags
Google’s argument: This would hand competitors the output and the accumulated insight of more than 25 years of indexing work.
Reid described the index as the product of proprietary crawling, annotation, and tiering systems that decide which pages enter Google Search:
- “The selection of webpages in Google’s search index is the result of more than twenty-five years of sustained investments and exhaustive engineering efforts.”
She warned that simply knowing which URLs Google indexes would allow rivals to skip large portions of crawling and analysis altogether:
- “Receiving the list of URLs in Google’s index will enable Qualified Competitors to forgo crawling and analyzing the larger web, and to instead focus their efforts on crawling only the fraction of pages Google has included in its index.”
Metadata such as crawl frequency would reveal how Google prioritizes freshness and demand, she added:
- “Information regarding Google’s crawl schedule will provide rivals with insight into Google’s proprietary freshness signals and index tiering structure.”
Included in the affidavit is this image, “Google’s Web Crawling and Indexing Process: The Results,” showing that Google labels the great majority of webpages as “Spam, Duplicates, & Low Quality Pages.”
- Google has crawled a redacted number of pages in the trillions. As of 2020, Google’s index contained roughly 400 billion documents, according to testimony from Pandu Nayak, a Google executive.
Risk of spam, abuse, and reputational damage
The concern: Google argues that exposing spam scores, even indirectly, would weaken its ability to fight webspam.
Effective spam fighting depends on secrecy, Reid stressed:
- “Fighting spam depends on obscurity, as external knowledge of spam-fighting mechanisms or signals eliminates the value of those mechanisms and signals.”
If spam scores leaked or were breached, bad…
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