Google scrapes Yahoo directory, wraps own ads around

I think this is an ancient page rewriter for crusty mobile browsers. Probably less insidious than the author thinks.

For example:

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?q=hacker+news&ei=d6xmT8nQB4S...

Note that I had to specifically choose "mobile view" to get this.

That's the Google Wireless Transcoder and you're about five years late to the party.

Also, it has nothing to do with scraping (though the whole point of the directory is to be scraped) and Google does not run its own ads on it (any ads that are stripped out are because Javascript is stripped out)..

By in large it sucks. But then again, browsing the web on a device this was meant for always sucks.

Google Mobile Search has been rewriting pages for old mobile browsers (pre-iPhone) for years. It's a similar system to Opera Mini's proxy, except rather than pre-rendered pages it outputs pages in either minimal HTML or WAP. Another way to look at it is it's like Google's text-only caches of pages. There's nothing Yahoo!-specific about it.