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How would you go about protecting the search results, say I plan to write an App Engine clone which actually url fetches results from your service and provide an ads free interface with some more features?

Is verifying the Referrer header enough for this kind of protection?

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Spoofing the referrer header is trivial and so wouldn't offer any protection in this case.

I do, however, wonder if there would be any benefit to scraping the beewulf site. Retrieving and parsing the relevant headers yourself is trivial and would remove from your hypothetical clone app any dependency on beewulf.

^ +1 Agreed.

ideamonk, I'm not storing the search results for now. In future, I plan to provide API for third-party websites to get the results.

My script does a simple PHP/Curl header retrieval to find the web server name.

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