pageoneresults - 2:27 pm on Feb 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

My question only had to do with legalities in concerns of companies that offer tools that do automated searches.

That is something only the search engines themselves can answer.

Many of the tools you are referring to require you to enter an API Key or some other key to access their data. If you are using that key along with the tool, everything should be fine.

I'm not too certain the search engines have the resources to chase rank checkers who do not comply with their guidelines. I've heard of blanket penalties imposed due to abuse of certain programs, WPG being one of them. I've not heard of any legal cases to date where a search engine actually enforced the guidelines from a legal perspective.

Their satisfaction comes in the fact that they can easily detect abusers of these programs and there have been many instances of users IPs being banned from accessing Google. Most of the abusers are new users who just check everything and let the program loose. It's easy to detect all those queries from static IPs running every 24 hours at the exact same time for weeks on end.

Can google or other engines press charges and if so why not!?

Sure they can. Take a gander here (this is for Google, the others have similar TOS)...

[google.com...]

Personal Use Only The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them, or mirror the Google home page or results pages on your Web site. You may not "meta-search" Google. If you want to make commercial use of the Google Services, you must enter into an agreement with Google to do so in advance.

No Automated Querying You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that "sending automated queries" includes, among other things: using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage "ranks" on Google for various queries; "meta-searching" Google; and performing "offline" searches on Google. Please do not write to Google to request permission to "meta-search" Google for a research project, as such requests will not be granted.