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Comment by drath | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, it's quite asshole-ish. On the other, google is serving broken frontends to their services and charge ridiculous prices on their API's. When I tried to make a third party search using google engine, I've exhausted the limit in less than an hour. It'd cost me like $40/mo to get what I get for free using their crappy frontend.

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> On the other, google is serving broken frontends to their services and charge ridiculous prices on their API's.

How does that make this okay? Nobody is entitled to get a company’s services for free just because you think their price is too high or their front ends aren’t built to your liking.

You could use the "turnabout is fair play argument". If you publish a web page, and don't specifically block google, they scrape your content, and use it for their own purposes. And even use it for "rich snippets", products other than search, etc. You're basically doing the same to them...using their content for your own purposes until they specifically block you.

Disagree. The web is clearly architected such that publishing a webpage makes it public and crawlable. You don’t “block Google”, you specify that the site is not for crawling in robots.txt according to well-known standards. This is all basically the contract of the internet and it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.

Google specifically does not publish their API for free consumption by other companies, yet that’s what’s happening here anyway. The company is also using specific tricks to circumvent detection of the behavior.

In your analogy, this would be like a crawler ignoring robots.txt and then scraping the content for their own website with zero attribution to the source, which is nothing like Google indexing your site with full attribution and driving traffic to it for you.

Regardless, “turnabout is fair play” is unequivocally not a legally or even ethically acceptable standard, so that argument wouldn’t actually hold up anywhere anyway.

I don’t understand your argument. There is no actual “publishing” of web sites or APIs on the web. You simply make something available at a URL, and it’s up to anyone else to discover that URL. In this regard, your personal web site is no different than this Google Translate web API.

> this would be like a crawler ignoring robots.txt

Google ignores the noindex directive in robots.txt now. You're supposed to put it in your HTTP response headers or HTML meta tags...

`noindex` was a Google-specific rule that was never officially documented nor supported. I think they were perfectly entitled to withdraw support for it, especially considering there are alternatives.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/07/a-note-on-...

"driving traffic to it for you."

I did mention rich snippets.

Google isn't entitled to get my personal data for free to, yet they do it anyway.

"Nobody is entitled to get a company’s services for free just because you think their price is too high or their front ends aren’t built to your liking." Tell this to Google!

Like telegram did with the translate api, there is also a way to have an unlimited api for search results. You have to find one of the old mobile pages of google.

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