Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Google don't define "automated query"it, and I don't think they can.
the phrases they use are well understood in the SE business. that's good enough for everyone involved (including courts; see below). > (What on earth is "meta-searching"? If you're going to use terms which > don't have a commonly understood meaning, define what they mean.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine > If I want to search for "foo", and I type "foo" into the Firefox search > box, is that an automated query? nope. unless you're a robot. > What if I type "gg: foo" into Konqueror's address bar, which expands to > "http://www.google.com/search?q=foo";? Is it okay if I type the URL by hand > myself? nope. unless you're a robot. > Can I use the browser to save the search page to a local HTML file? If > Google says no, how can they possibly hope to stop me? what you do with the search results once you've gotten them is outside the scope of that clause. > What if I type this command into my shell? > > elinks --dump "http://www.google.com/search?q=foo"; > output.html > > What if I type > > wget "http://www.google.com/search?q=foo"; > > into the shell? Surely that's no more automated than typing "foo" > into Google's search box. neither is automated, unless you're a robot. > Where is the line I must not cross? letting a program generate search requests based on something other than "human wants to find something and types some keywords into a prompt somewhere". > And that, it seems to me, is what the Original Poster wanted. the OP wanted to read keywords from a text file generated in some unknown fashion. that's bot behaviour, not human behaviour. > Of course, what I think isn't important. If Google wants to write legal > contracts that won't stand up in court (speaking as somebody who isn't a > lawyer and whose legal advice is worthless) well, "here's some random guy who didn't understand the terms used in the contract" isn't a valid defense in court; courts are more interested in whether people with experience from the relevant field can reasonably be expected to understand the contract. but this isn't about court cases, of course; it's about getting banned by Google for abusing their services. </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
