Google protects its search results
This month, about 100 Comcast subscribers were temporarily shut out of Google when the search company charged the high-speed Internet access provider with hosting some accounts that had abused its terms of service by performing "automated queries." The crackdown cut a wide swath, taking out a block of IP addresses, shutting down the guilty and innocent alike.
"We are not accusing you personally of having violated our Terms of Service," said Google's notice to Emoungu, a computer programmer who has been a subscriber to Comcast's high-speed Internet service for two years. "You are most likely an innocent victim of someone else's bad behavior. We're really sorry to have had to take this action."
Those of us in the end-to-end, stupid network camp can find wry amusement in this - comcast is being penalised for making their network smart by violating end-to-end principles. If the google-hogging user's machine had a hard ip address, he could be filtered alone.
Google are not averse to programmatic use of their database - they just launched web APIs for it, though with a 1,000 query per day limit.
I do hope he's not running an exhaustive search for high-scoring GoogleWhacks - that would make me feel guilty...
Thursday, 18 April 2002
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