It´s made by Rapidshare. See: http://images.rapidforum.com/rapidshare/lupe.gif, the image is from Rapidshare, not Google.

I suspect that he's doing this without Google's permission and is risking account termination.

Google is incredibly good at finding you if you're messing around with their stuff. I have 2 letters from Google Staff so far from various things I've done in the past that they didn't like. It might be good to keep track of all their "Friendly" emails to the community. Personally, I find the way they contact with the public pretty dictatorial and unshakable. When they make requests, you have no opprotunity for a rebuttle and most likely, they will never respond to your reply. I'd rather deal with a local police man.

I've had different experiences with the "Google police". They once complained about me having put up the official Google Answers Researcher logo here* and asked me to remove it. I wrote back politely telling them I *am* a Google Answers Researcher... I guess they couldn't resist my logic... :)

* http://blogoscoped.com/interviews.html

Other things they asked me to do?
- Put a disclaimer in the chat that it's not related to Google
- Stop calling the chat bot "Googlebot"...
- Remove the Googlebomb logo on some posts which showed a black bomb as an "o" of Google
- .. I've complied to all of above, and didn't see any harm in those requests (not unlike some others Cease & Desists I got which I didn't find as reasonable) ...

I don't mind them asking, but they don't reply to their questions and that makes every request seem like a command.

How often do they reply back to you? But your answer might be skewed since you run the Blogoscoped.

It's all legit, Google provides some publishers custom formats. I have permission to use it, but their support seems quite limited. I don't want to risk revealing anything here, but you can use javascript or iframe to call variables from Google. If you don't have permission, obviously you can't do it. LOL, but having poermission still may not get you there either. :oO

sorry, looks like I'm just some other dude. Sorry some dude, didn't mean to use your moniker....