Do you remember Scroogle? Daniel Brandt, of Google-Watch.org, created Scroogle when he discovered that you could see pre-update results for search terms when you included “+ jibberish term” after your key term.

Click here to comment about Scroogle.

His “scraper” queried Google for a term, then queried it again with the jibberish terms added so that you could compare your before and after-update search terms.

Blocked by Google. On December 7th, 11 days after he put up the Scroogle site, Google IP blocked his server so that he could no longer receive results.

He changed servers right away, and the same results continued to show until the 11th of December, when Google fixed the glitch that allowed the old results to show. He still has a list on his site of many of his old “before and after” results tests.

Why did Google block Scroogle? Google’s explicit about their stance on third parties scraping their results: “You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system without express permission in advance from Google.” (From their terms of service page.)

Daniel believes this rule is related more to automated queries that hit Google millions of times for spam or other nefarious purpose. At the peak of Scroogle’s popularity it only hit Google about 20,000 times.

Plus, he originally built the scraper months ago to provide ad-free results. You can still search Google ad free from his site. Google took no notice of this scraper, which regularly requests results for 5,000 searches a day.

So why else would Google block Scroogle? Daniel thinks Google blocked his scrape because it showed Google’s hand, something Google, as a highly secretive company, didn’t like.

Scroogle was not intended to make money – there was no motive for Scroogle other than to comment on Google’s latest update. Daniel believes that what he was doing was fair use, and that Google essentially violated his right to free speech.

But what was Google so reluctant to reveal?According to Daniel, the hardest hit terms were those that included “your city” + “search term.” Among these, realtors were especially hurt.

While they’re mostly back to normal now (he did point out that, as of 12-22-03, “your city” + “hotel” still delivers irrelvant results), he thinks these changes point to an increased localization, a sort of Google Yellow Pages that will be an enormous money maker once Google goes public.

So, did Google block Scroogle because of a violation of company policy or because they didn’t like that Scroogle revealed details about the change in their algorithm? Why do you think the localized results were among the most skewed after the most recent update?

You make the call.

To be fair, I think you should have some more background on Brandt. cbp from the forums offered this site, which questions whether Brandt is truly working in the public interest. I thought the url was funny: http://www.google-watch-watch.org/.

Happy Holidays!
Garrett + WebProNews Team

Garrett French is the editor of iEntry’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.