[sf-perl] website searching/filtering script

[Randal L. Schwartz]

>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Lyke <danlyke at flutterby.com> writes:

Dan> Although I run screaming from "give us your name and password"
Dan> applications, Blogger is the first one that comes to mind, I could
Dan> easily see a useful service that would be extracting this information
Dan> from so-called "social networking" sites like MySpace and FaceBook and
Dan> transferring it to other places. And neither of those companies is
Dan> going to make extracting the user's data easy. There's a legit
Dan> application that involves scraping names.

And violates Blogger's terms of service which includes Google's Terms
of Service:

  5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by
    any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google,
    unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement
    with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access)
    any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts
    or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions
    set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

As I'm saying, just because you can *technically* run a scraper, doesn't mean
that you can legally, or morally, or ethically.

Dan> There are lots of good reasons to write scrapers and bots, not all of
Dan> them are nefarious.

But some of them are wrong.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!