It seems like every few weeks now the Google scraping site Scroogle completely falls apart.  Last time it happened they blamed Google for shutting down some old link to search results that they were using because it was easier to scrape.  This time they are blaming Google again, even suggesting that scroogle may be shut down permanently.

Any regular reader to this site can infer that I don’t like Google for a number of reasons, the most important being their privacy practices.  Every search query, and what you click on is stored by Google.  Wouldn’t this information be a goldmine for modern paranoid intelligence agencies?  It is.  I would love to dedicate an entire article about the specific instances of government agencies viewing certain “profiling” articles I have written.  When someone uses Google, and clicks on your site in the results, your site can see the query used to find yourself.  This is just the tip of the iceberg compared with what Google has.

So, Scroogle and sites like it have value. Don’t blame Google for your problems keeping your site operational.  Be real computer scientists and write some new scraping code for crying out loud!  Get someone else to do it for you otherwise.  Why not get some real street credibility and write your own search engine?  Seriously, there are undergraduate programs all over the country that do this as a project in semester-length courses.

The Scroogle scraped results are not available.  I’ll bet there are at least 100 computer scientists out there reading this article that could solve this problem over the weekend.  In the meantime, throw together some results from other search engines.  Scrahoo!  Scring!

I want to go on the record and say that ELWsoftware.com will solve this Scroogle problem for the low low price of $10k.  I know it can be done for less money, but I don’t hear anyone else offering.