nowwho said:
Hey,
Thanks for the information so far. I didn't realise there was so much
legal stuff envolved, its for a once off educational project. Didn't
think it would amount to spamming. The pogram would only be run about
50 times in total. There is a set number of queries, and a set number
of results returned. As its an eductional project I never thought of
the legal side!
It's not spamming -- I don't know what the other guy was smoking when he
wrote the post you're replying to. There is NO DIFFERENCE discernible to
Google if you
a) do 10 searches during the day by typing in a Firefox window while
doing research or
b) have your computer do the searches with less/no typing on your part
Google is being "ripped off" iff you do something like:
a) use huge amounts of their bandwidth -- well in excess of a normal
user doing a bit of heavy research say, generating large numbers of
searches or delving very deeply into the result set. Fetching 10
first-pages-of-results one for each of 10 queries, whether done by one
mouse click or ten typed-in queries, has little impact on them, and of
course the one mouse click case makes it actually 10 queries instead of
11 because you mistyped one and had to do it again
b) or use google search results to populate your own rival "search
engine" site with revenue-generating ads or what-have-you, either by
scraping google's database or by just putting up a page with a script
that takes peoples' queries and passes them to google, then takes the
result page and replaces google's sponsored links with umpteen flashing
banner ads. Then you're using google's work output to actually compete
against google, rather than simply using google for research. That makes
a crucial difference.
Using code to drive Google lightly and for personal/educational/research
reasons rather than commercial ones doesn't seem to be evil to me,
especially if they cannot in practise distinguish it from "normal" use
anyway, as it isn't producing excessive traffic or being used to compete
against google in some way.
In fact, where do you draw the line? Firefox with manually-typed queries
is OK. Then we have Firefox with a MRU for queries; Firefox with query
guessing or autocompletion based on your current activities and
interests; Firefox with a plugin to take the result set too and
transform it e.g. to show 50 rather than 10 hits or to weed out
"supplemental results" that are usually MFA sites that really ARE
ripping off google; Firefox with a plugin to run the query of your
choice and bookmark the results every few days; ... Firefox with a
plugin to gradually build up a database of hits for various queries by
occasionally fetching the nth page of results for one of them, but you
don't publish these anywhere, just use them personally ...
I think the two things that mark a transition to being evil are causing
them excessive traffic and competing with them using their own data in
some way. (Also generating content-free MFA pages to generate revenue
via AdSense ads and SEOing them, but that's more using AdSense than
using the search engine proper, though the SEO will impact the latter
and pollute the results.)
I don't see any way to derive some kind of moral law that makes typing
something morally superior to doing it with one click, and actually
scheduling an automatic (infrequent) job or whatever actually sinful.
There's no inherent virtue in inefficiency, and computers exist to
enable automating tasks. Hyperlinks automate looking up and finding that
dusty reference or whatever; librarians may complain that they rot young
brains but the actual upshot is a gain in productivity, rather than some
kind of evil decadence setting in.