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" interface. By using this proxy, users bypass both Google's notorious "2038" cookie (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. Read the rest of the article at The Register.
Personally I see no need for something like this. Google itself is very good with ads, since it only displays text and most of the time they're quite relevant. Google, although they make a lot of money, offer a good service to people. How many less hits would the sites in google's database have if google wasn't there?
