A federal judge indicated yesterday that he is prepared to give the US Department of Justice a partial victory in its effort to subpoena millions of search records from Google Inc.'s industry-leading Internet search service.

"I am going to grant some relief to the government," said US District Judge James Ware in San Jose, Calif., after the Justice Department agreed to sharply reduce the amount of information it wants from Google as part of an effort to measure the quantity of pornography available to minors on the Internet.

The government also offered to compensate the company for the cost of providing the data.The Justice Department had wanted Google to turn over a million Internet addresses contained in its index, as well as one week's worth of searches entered into the system by users.

But yesterday the government said it would settle for a tiny fraction of that -- 50,000 Internet addresses, of which it would review just 10,000, and 5,000 queries, of which the government would inspect just 1,000.

''It appears that the judge is going to try to split the baby," said Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties organization that support's Google's resistance to the subpoena.

Google's associate general counsel Nicole Wong cast the government's reduced demands as a partial victory. ''At a minimum we've come a long way from the initial subpoena request," Wong said. ''When the government was asked to justify their demand they conceded that they needed much less."

Google officials declined to say whether the company would continue its resistance to the subpoena, pending the publication of the judge's ruling.
A Justice Department spokesman also declined to comment until the ruling is issued.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. Material from Bloomberg News Service was used in this report.