Scroogle

Scraping and ad-stripping Google’s results is an explanation/manifesto explaining why they offer open-source code for scraping the Google search results pages.

“If done in the public interest and not for profit, it’s legal. What’s more, Google can’t block you if they can’t find you.”

Their basic point is that Google has built a $50 Billion market cap simply by trawling the Internet for content you’ve created, attaching ads to it and serving it all up in super-context-sensitive search results. They do a great job. So what’s to stop you from doing the same thing to them? Especially if you don’t show any ads or make any money from it. They posit that by US law, pages like this Google backdoor are legal. They released the source code in order to “escalate the issue”, get it into court and establish a legal precedent.

“If it can be established that what we’re doing is legal — or at least sufficiently legal so that Google is not eager to challenge us — then this will begin to restore a public-interest balance to the web that has been declining ever since big money got behind the dot-coms.”

I think this is fascinating, will have no effect on Google’s profits and may just do what they hope it will. I wish them luck with it. I may even start searching from here; why not? They’re the same results. Except … it’s too bad I sometimes click on the sponsored links on the left because Google is pretty damned good at what it does.

Gotcha indeed.