Scroogle

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A public service of Google Watch

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.