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Skriven 2005-01-25 10:30:30 av Chris (1:379/45)
Ärende: An open source Google - without the ads
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From: Chris <nospam@noemail>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/11/open_source_google_scraper/
(context links below story)

An open source Google - without the ads By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Tuesday 11th January 2005 09:44 GMT

With the hope of returning at least one corner of the web to its non-commercial
roots, Google watcher Daniel Brandt, who curates the NameBase archive, has
released the source code to a Google scraper. Brandt has been making an ad-free
proxy available for two years using Google's little known minimal "ie"<1>
interface. By using this proxy, users bypass both Google's notorious "2038"
cookie<2> (that's when it expires) and the text ads.

Brandt fully expects Google to throw legal and technical resources at him, but
says he welcomes the challenge if only to clarify copyright issues. Google took
people's free stuff and made a $50 billion business from it, he argues.

"The commercialization of the web became possible only because tens of
thousands of noncommercial sites made the web interesting in the first place,"
he writes. "All search engines should make a stable, bare-bones, ad-free,
easy-to-scrape version of their results available for those who want to set up
nonprofit repeaters. Even if it cuts into their ad profits slightly, there's no
easier way to give back some of what they stole from us."

He explains in more detail in the source code: "Legally, Google probably has
the right to block anyone they want. And legally, we believe that as a tiny
nonprofit with an interest in Google's violations of privacy, we have the right
to access Google's publicly-available data any way we want. If you want to
argue about copyright, then let's start with the fact that Google scrapes
billions of web pages and doesn't ask permission before making the cache copies
available. Thiss craping is used as a carrier for the ads that make Google
stinkin' rich.

"Now that, in our opinion, is an interesting copyright issue. As this is
written, Google has a market cap of $55bn. This exceeds the market cap of
General Motors and Ford combined. Google is probably the single largest
information resource on the planet, and they're getting rich off of us. It's
time for Google to give something back to the public sector."

The source code, which runs on Linux, asks the users only to use the program
for non-commercial purposes.

"We think it would be splendid if scraping Google for nonprofit purposes, and
stripping out their wretched advertising, was established someday as an
acceptable, legal practice."

In the week since it launched, the source code has been downloaded about a
hundred times a day says Brandt.

Google would rather you licensed its beta Web API<3>. However, as Charles
Ferguson writing in MIT Technology Review noted recently, the service is
"laughably limited" to 1,000 queries a day, and offers little functionality;
Google has let the offering languish.

You can find the code here [ZIP archive, 16kb]<4>, an explanation here<5> and
try out the proxy here<6>. R

http://www.google.com/ie
http://www.google-watch.org/cgi-bin/cookie.htm
http://www.google.com/apis/
http://www.scroogle.org/zipdir/nbbw.zip
http://www.scroogle.org/gscrape.html
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

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