Monday, January 26, 2009

RankSearch - The end already?

A friend at work informed me that the script that I have in mind for RankSearch might violate Google's Terms of Service.
I did some research and it looks like he's right. From Google's ToS:

Automated queries

Google's Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google. Sending automated queries absorbs resources and includes using any software (such as WebPosition Gold™) to send automated queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks in Google search results for various queries.

What's your take on that? If RankSearch is implemented as a sequence of http queries, will it violate the ToS? This could get DamienLearnsPerl banned (I would get my life back!).
On the other hand, the amount of queries would be really low...
I looked for an email address to contact Google to ask the question but couldn't find any. Will look again tomorrow.

French expression of the day
"Chat échaudé craint l'eau froide": once bitten, twice shy (litterally: scalded cat fears cold water)

Next posts:
  • More about CPAN
  • Our first Perl program - Part III: Launch a HTTP request
  • How to install Google Analytics on your Blogger blog
  • Our first Perl program - Part IV: Read results from a HTML page
  • Perl help resources
  • Our first Perl program - Part V: Result analysis
  • POD
  • Our first Perl program - Part VI: Add a GUI interface

1 comment :

  1. I asked the question on the Google Web search help forum:
    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=5342a2cbaa0d6535&hl=en

    We'll see what comes out of this.

    ReplyDelete