A fellow by the name of Stephen Morrison has hacked up “Proogle,” a Google skin that returns Google’s results but adds in PageRank scores. The site is linked to what I presume is Stephen’s home site, Webmaster Brain” (no contact info on his site, but a number of neat tools are there, including a link popularity tester).
I’m told Proogle has gotten quite popular among the webmaster community, as a result, I’ll wager won’t be up for long – it more likely than not generates more than 1000 searches a day, a violation of Google’s terms of service. (The site even implores: “Google, Please Don’t Sue!”) This is yet another example of interesting hacks built on top of Google that, in the end, will probably end up on the dustbin due to popularity. Another recent example is Social Grid. I did hear back from the fellow behind that site, who admits he has yet to “ask permission” to build on top of Google. His credo: Code now, ask for forgiveness later.
Thanks to Aaron Wall of SEO Book/ SEO Index for pointing this out to me.
John,
You mention that Proogle probably violates Google’s TOS, since they are almost certainly doing more than 1,000 searches/day. I assume that number is a reference to the number of queries you are allowed to do with a Google API key … and while I’m not a lawyer, I believe that if they WERE using the API to get this data, they would be legit (ignoring the confusion surrounding if it is legit to do page rank lookups now that the checksum is broken).
However, they are almost certainly doing “screen scapes” – i.e. send the request to http://www.google.com rather than through the API, and this is clearly in violated of the TOS as can be seen at http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html
BTW, it IS a neat page, the comment at the bottom “Don’t sue” is hilarious, and it would be nice if Google displayed this on their results (they do for directory stuff).
Having written the above, I’m still surprised that Google hasn’t shut these guys down yet! 😉
I don’t think that they use the Google API, especially since you can not use it to strip Pageranks if I recall correctly.
Every search takes a couple of seconds… As long as it takes, they might as well load every page with the toolbar and grab the pagerank info from the cache. That would fix the checksum problem at the same time 😉
btw – Proogle is now just ‘Prog’
Wow…I was acutally looking something for this. I was very tempted in buying programs that will do this for you ie PRPowler.
Thanks for the link.
Mike
thanks,nice post,waiting for more good posts