Google News To RSS Scraper

TimYang.com has a Google News scraper available called ScrappyGoo. It scrapes Google News results and generates an RSS feed of the results, supplying 16 results at a time. Since this is a violation of Google's TOS I suspect this resource is not long for this world, but you may see it and use it at http://timyang.com/scrappygoo/ . It works with the standard search operators and generates what appears to be an RSS 2.0 feed.

The violation of Google's TOS? Google's Terms of Service at http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html say "You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them" which I think is what ScrappyGoo is doing.

I'm of about fifty different minds on this. On the one hand I've been wishing for a Google News RSS feed for ages. On the other hand the fact that I'm wishing for something doesn't give me the right to violate a TOS. On one hand I'm getting extremely frustrated that so many other news sites generate RSS feeds, but Google News doesn't. On the other hand my frustration doesn't give me the right to violate a TOS. On the one hand Google wants to position itself as an incredibly useful go-to search engine, and for the most part it is. On the other hand the lack of RSS functionality is more and more annoying as I integrate RSS more and more into my "online experience" if I may get all pretentious on you for a minute.

A short-term solution might be for Google to single out one of these news-to-RSS scrapers (I've seen others, though the others I've seen have mostly been shut down), work with the programmer to make sure that it's creating the lightest load possible on the Google News servers, and then unofficially "bless" it and watch. If lots and lots of people are using it, then hey, Google knows there's a demand. Maybe they analyze the keywords that are coming through the service and decide that there might be room for a pay service or some other adjustment to their offerings.

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