Violation of Google Search's terms of service?

Question

I am planning to write a short Perl script on my blog to automatically retrieve the ranking of a given URL for a specific keyword (see http://damienlearnsperl.blogspot.com/search/label/RankSearch?max-results=100). I am afraid that I do not have the right to do that with regards to Google's terms of service. I have asked my question on Google's Web Search help forum a week ago but no response so far. Is there a way I could accomplish my goal without violating the TOS? Or should I give up on the project all together? Thanks!

PS: I plan to blog about the script details (i.e making it public vs personal use) -> so, to avoid the (unlikely) case where a lot of people use my filthy script, I have decided to pull out the project from the public eye. Thanks stackoverflow community for the good and speedy advice!

Answer 1

According to Google's TOS, you are correct in assuming that you do not have the right to do this.

Can you get away with doing it anyway? Probably so.

Should you? Probably not.

If it's just a personal project with low traffic, go for it.

Answer 2

I created a rank checker very similar to the one you describe. It checked the first 100 results against keywords and URLs. Google is so big unless you used it hundereds of thousands of times a day I doubt they would do anything. The worst they would do in my opinion would be block your servers IP from accessing their search, but even that is unlikely.

Answer 3

I wrote a similar program myself. Now, when I then do a normal web search within a browser I am occasionally told that my request looks like an automated request. I am shown a CAPTCHA to check if I am human.

Answer 4

I believe they have an automated checked though. Sometimes I remember if you search too fast too soon, a popup will occur for you to verify if you're a human. It asks you to enter some letters on the screen.

For example, at a large company, everything appears it comes from a single ip. So if everyone is using google at once, it could flood their systems. So taking that into factor, I highly doubt they'll do anything against you even if your page is sending 100s of requests.