Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Would it be ok to scrape google's results and distribute them, while saying you don't accept their TOS? It's a bit like not paying taxes and saying you didn't sign up for that. Who knows, maybe that's the way forward


I am not a lawyer. But I think this was settled with the LinkedIn lawsuit. Yes, it's perfectly fine to scrape public facing information.


Yes, it's been well established that accessing a site is not the same as accepting it's TOS. And That's why Google and any competent site know it's their responsibility to detect scraping and suspicious behavior and block it themselves.


You mean like Startpage.com does?


> Would it be ok to scrape google's results and distribute them, while saying you don't accept their TOS? It's a bit like not paying taxes and saying you didn't sign up for that.

When Google has the ability to levy taxes, things will be very different all over.


That's an amusing example.

You are aware that Google scrapes almost every page on the internet, without having any agreement with most of them, right?

Yes, you can add noindex and robots.txt to tell them you'd like to opt-out, but:

a) That only works so well, and b) they're default is to use your page without your permission.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: