I attempted to do a search using my favourite search website today – Scroogle Scraper – only to be redirected to the following post on Scroogles homepage:

We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we’ve been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we’ve been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002.

This interface (here’s a sample from years ago) was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every Google data center in exactly the same form, which allowed us to use 700 IP addresses for Google.

That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time. It didn’t show the snippets unless you moused-over the links it produced (they were there for our program, so that was okay), and it has never had any ads. Our impression was that these results were from Google’s basic algorithms, and that extra features and ads were added on top of these generic results. Three years ago Google launched “Universal Search,” which meant that they added results from other Google services on their pages. But this simple interface we were using was not affected at all.

Now that interface is gone. It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google’s main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it.

Thank you for your support during these past five years. Check back in a week or so; if we don’t hear from Google by next week, I think we can all assume that Google would rather have no Scroogle, and no privacy for searchers, at all.

— Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, scroogle AT lavabit.com

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi

- accessed 10:10am, Tuesday May 11th 2010

If, as suggested above, this really is the end of Scroogle, then this change marks a sad day.

What was important for me about the Scroogle Search, was that it offered an alternative (parasitic?) reading of Googles search algorithm, providing results free from paid advertising and also without granting Google an IP addressed search record as exchange currency.

I have to admit that I won’t miss the hokey cartoons and seemingly abject anti-Google paranoia which prevailed on Scroogle, but my internet experience will be poorer without their regular and healthy dose of skepticism toward Googles globally dominant infrastructure.

The example set by the Scroogle Scraper offered the potential for alternative and critical readings to flourish online, taking datasets and information provided by major institutions as ’source material’ rather than ‘finished product’.  Without the option for ‘interfacing’ with the information, that potential is diminished: it wasn’t ‘the vandals took the handles‘ after all.

(Please add comments below.)

In November 2009, television news reports from the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall returned to our screens, 20 years on, like retinal after images. The Berlin Wall had not been a mere boundary marker but a globally visible, physical, manifestation of a global scale political impasse. The transgression and fall of the wall are now seen as emblematic of the groundswell political changes sweeping Eastern Bloc countries at that time.

In advance of our trip to Berlin for Transmediale, I want to consider some contemporary boundaries and how they manifest.

What (if anything) might contemporary boundaries be symbolic manifestations of?

A couple of months ago I saved a link to a ‘Virtual Berlin Wall’ project but now that I return to the link it directs me to the ‘Google’ web search home page – this anomaly takes this blog post off at a tangent…

Virtual Berlin wall launched to commemorate walls http://tinyurl.com/ydl2oqp 3:47 AM Nov 9th from web

There are three possible reasons for this unexpected outcome:

1. – it is simply a dead link and ‘Google’ is the ‘in browser’ default
2. – this is a smartass conceptual art joke
3. – the ‘error’ is some kind of freudigital slip

I choose to believe all three of the above reasons to be correct.

Google is a kind of global digital interfacing membrane, which applies top secret filtration algorithms in order to control, administer and record the exchange of information on the internet.

Today’s withdrawal of Google from the Chinese ‘market’ on grounds of ongoing state censorship is seen by political commentators as a gesture towards a western democratic moral and political highground.

Despite Google’s seeming omnipotence, the vast majority of internet users seem to perceive Google, less as an oppressive ‘wall’ rather, as a benevolent ‘gateway’. For many, Google is a symbol of free, easy access to information and, as such, Google is more analogous in popular consciousness to the Brandenburg Gate than the Berlin Wall.

Brandenburg Gate image used under licence from Wikimedia Commons.

Links:

Google and China: a cynical ploy or a principled stand? – Charlie Beckett, Director POLIS

Google and China: What’s the real story, and where does it go from here? – Mac Slocum. O’Reilly Radar