Yesterday, I posted a link to Yoz Grahame's rant on Google Toolbar, a service that lets you change the webpages on your screen so that things like ISBNs and addresses are automatically linked to database entries on various services.
One question that arises from this is: how would Google feel if you were to provide a service that reformatted its pages for others to use? As it turns out, Google routinely allows it. Here are three examples:
- W3C HTML Validator: Scrapes Google and reformats it, commenting on its use of html, linking to relevant elements of the spec
- Bobby Accessibility Validator: Scrapes Google and reformats it, commenting on its adherence to accessibility guidelines
- For Me To Poop On: Scrapes Google and reformats it with a large, floating pile of dogshit drawn over the screen
Update: Phil adds, "don't forget GooglePreview, the Firefox extension that adds dinky thumbnail views of websites directly onto the Google search results page."
Update 2: Nearly forgot my favorite: The Internet Archive scrapes Google, reformats it, and replaces all the links with links to cached historical versions of Google's pages.
Update 3: Two more gooduns: Scroogle "scrapes Google, discards the ads, removes cookie, and has access log deleted after 7 days" (Thanks, Philip!); and Gizoogle "scrapes Google entries…and reformats them from Snoop Dogg's internet perspecizzle" (Thanks, J!).
Update 4: Not always, though: George reminds us that "Julian Bond wrote a PHP script to reformat Google News searches as RSS and Google had him take it down. He was simply aggregating data from Google News, which is exactly what Google News does to other sites."
Update 5: Christoph sez, "Marcos Weskamp's excellent newsmap is remixing Google News for quite some time now and it's still running. Perhaps he has reached some agreement by now, but when he presented his project at Ars Electronica last year he mentioned that he's scraping Google News."
Update 6: Google Mirror scrapes Google result screens and reverses them (Thanks, John!).
