Uncle Sam may be getting into the search-engine business -- as the ultimate Web voyeur.

In its ongoing effort to prevent online pornography sites from making their content available to minors, the Bush administration has subpoenaed Google to release one week's worth of search data -- roughly 1 million records containing all searches within a 7-day period -- in order to see how often porn shows up in random online searches.

The government has requested the data to bolster their case for the Child Online Privacy Protection Act, a law that would punish adult porn sites that allowed minors to access their content. The law was passed in 1998 and struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004 for being too broad and potentially preventing adults from accessing legal X-rated sites.

So far, Google has refused to release the data, saying the government's request was "overreaching" and would violate their users' trust and privacy rights.

"We had lengthy discussions with [the government] to try and resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously," Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel, said in a statement.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department had not returned calls requesting comment at press time, but in court papers filed Wednesday, its lawyers said "the production of [these] materials would be of significant assistance to the government's preparation of its defense of constitutionality of this important statute" and "would assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current Web users ... and to measure the effectiveness of filtering software in screening that material."

Sherwin Siy, a staff counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights advocacy group, commended Google on their stance to refuse to turn over the materials and said the government is simply going on a "fishing expedition" in an effort to obtain personal information.

"It's not just fishing, it's wholesale trawling," he told MTV News. "They're not doing the targeted requests that a law-enforcement investigation normally does in these cases, and it's a bit strange for them to say they need all this information just to test filtering technology, if that's really what they're doing."

Siy noted that if the government only wanted to test filtering technology, it could do so from its own offices without requesting such a large volume of material. But he also added that Google's possession of such information makes it a target, and that users need to be aware of what information is stored on search engines, and how that information is used.

"Google has been a ticking time bomb for awhile in terms of privacy, because of the amount of information that they gather and store on individuals, their searches and all the activities they can conduct through Google," he explained.

According to the EPIC, when a user's private information is compiled in a database and given to someone, that person can sell the information to marketers. It can result in individuals being profiled for telemarketers, junk mail and can even lead to price discrimination on products individuals have shown interest in.

Google is currently the most prominent search engine on the Web: It conducts nearly 50 percent of all U.S. Web searches, compared with 23 percent by Yahoo! and 11 percent by MSN, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

"[But] this goes beyond just Google," Siy said. "There are other major players out there who are doing the same thing [collecting data], so this is an issue that people will have to confront with other companies in the future."