A federal judge ordered Google Inc to give the Bush administration a peek inside its search engine, but rebuffed the government’s demand for a list of people’s search requests - potentially sensitive information that the company had fought to protect.

In his 21-page ruling on Friday, US District Judge James Ware told Google to provide the US Justice Department with the ad-dresses of 50,000 randomly selected Web sites indexed by its search engine by April 3. The government plans to use the data for a study in another case in Pennsyl-vania, where the Bush administration is trying to revive a law meant to shield children from on-line pornography.

Ware, though, decided Google won’t have to disclose what people have been looking for on its widely used search engine, handing a significant victory to the company and privacy rights ad-vocates.

“We will always be subject to government subpoenas, but the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring,” Google lawyer Nicole Wong wrote on the company’s Web site last night. “What his rul-ing means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies.”

Attempts to reach a spokesman for the Justice Department last night weren’t immediately successful. The government had asked for the contents of 5,000 randomly selected search requests, dramatically scaling back its initial de-mands after Google’s vehement protests gained widespread attention.