Text 2149, 61 rader
Skriven 2005-01-25 10:33:48 av Chris (1:379/45)
   Kommentar till text 2148 av Chris (1:379/45)
Ärende: Re: An open source Google - without the ads
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From: Chris <nospam@noemail>

http://www.scroogle.org/gscrape.html

Scraping and ad-stripping Google's results

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.


Public Information Research, Inc., the nonprofit public charity behind
www.google-watch.org and www.scroogle.org, has been running a Google proxy for
more than two years. On January 3, 2005 we released the source code for our
proxy. Our review of the legal situation has convinced us that we are covered
by "fair use" under the Copyright Act.

This step that we have taken has implications for all search engines. These
engines crawl the public web without asking permission, and cache and reproduce
the content without asking permission, and then use this information as a
carrier for ads that generate private profit. We are convinced that if citizens
scrape Google and strip the ads, and make the scraped results available as a
nonprofit public service, that this is legal. This is especially the case if
there are public policy concerns behind the scraping.

Google Watch has been the most prominent critic of Google's outrageous privacy
policies for more than two years. This is why we started the proxy, and it's
why we continue the proxy. We invite Google to serve us with a cease and desist
letter as a first step toward resolving this issue. So far, we have yet to hear
from Google's lawyers. By releasing the source code for our proxy, we're trying
to escalate the issue.

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.

There is the additional problem of whether anyone who scrapes Google can avoid
getting blocked by Google. We experienced this when Google blocked Scroogle in
December, 2003. We moved to a different server and continued as before, because
Google could no longer find us. In our opinion, it's legal for Google to block
whomever they want, even while it's also legal for us to scrape them if we can.

If the scraping is done properly, it is not worth Google's trouble to find you.
Our source code separates the "fetch" portion of program, which is done by curl
or wget, from the searcher interface and parsing of the fetched results. If the
fetching is done by a server on a different Class C address from the website
that shows the scraped results, there is little that Google can do to find the
IP address that is responsible for the actual fetch.

Chris wrote:
> 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
>
<snip>

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