Google is going to bat for its users, for once. The giant has decided to challenge a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) warrant that is looking for information on everybody who searched for a number of specific keywords.
The case is being heard in Clark County’s Eighth Judicial District Court and is related to the July killing of a homeless woman. The details of the case are sealed, as are the search terms in question, and how many people are affected by the warrant.
Google is asking the court to quash it as an “illegal general warrant.”
We obtained a copy of the motion for you here.
The company said the warrant is “facially invalid” and “violates Federal and State constitutional provisions.”
The LVMPD, on the other hand, has so far not commented, saying only that it does not comment on pending litigation.
The first hearing in the case is set for late October.
Nevada, where the case is taking place, has no law on reverse search warrants.
Google also revealed in the filing that the LVMPD and the Henderson Police Department have in the past served it with numerous reverse search warrants, and that it was under a gag order, i.e., barred from disclosing this information to the public for months.
The EFF’s Andrew Crocker said that Google does not always challenge these warrants. “It does make me wonder what about this particular one has caused them to challenge it,” he said.
Crocker also said that such warrants let the government “rummage through people’s information.”
He believes keyword warrants could “end up being the kind of back door or substitute for these other kinds of warrants they have decided not to comply with anymore.”
The legal status of reverse keyword warrants is not entirely clear, since no federal appellate court has ruled on the matter of whether obtaining this data from search engines is a search.
However, Colorado’s Supreme Court in 2023 decided that a keyword warrant was “constitutionally defective” – but allowed the evidence to stand under the “good faith” exception.
Delaware became the first state to restrict reverse keyword warrants, with the ACLU of the state calling it “a significant win for privacy.”
Google has in the past taken steps to make it harder for law enforcement to get personal data of its users. In December 2023 it moved Location History onto users’ devices, which effectively ended the company’s ability to provide location data to answer geofence warrants.
Reclaim The Net has reported about a number of cases involving reverse keyword search warrants, including one in December 2025 when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the practice in a rape case, Commonwealth v. Kurtz, finding that general search queries are not protected by the Fourth Amendment.
In June, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie that geofence warrants do trigger Fourth Amendment protection.
Unsealed records showed that a keyword warrant had been used to pull anonymized data on roughly 1,341 people who had searched for the address of a political party headquarters.
In the US, the legality of reverse search warrants is essentially decided on a state-by-state basis.
