By Danny Goodwin
Publication Date: 2026-01-22 20:23:00
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…
