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webcollage != google

jwz [PersonRank 0]

Wednesday, January 5, 2005
19 years ago

Does that Google book actually claim Webcollage uses Google? Because it doesn't.

It used to, many years ago, but Google complained and started blocking the webcollage user agent.

Alta Vista added a URL specifically to make Webcollage work better with their search engine. Google said "we'll think about it" and then never wrote back. Boo Google. Booooo.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

19 years ago #

Nope... I just see they actually mention this fact. There's a blurb reading:

"As Jamie notes, he's disabled the Google search in WebCollage (you can just uncomment it in your downloaded version) because it's not a Google API-based application and so is not in keeping with Google's Terms of Service (...) You can, however, very easily write a Google-specific API-friendly version."

I wonder what they mean by writing an API-friendly version – wouldn't WebCollage want to access Google Images, to which there is no API?

Sometimes I wonder how long Google can keep up this stance of disallowing certain screenscraping solutions, when they are basing a company around the whole idea of screenscraping the web. Of course there's the robots.txt which they respect... so maybe they expect this of others too.

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