Everyman - 6:34 pm on Jan 8, 2002 (gmt 0)

GoogleGuy, you have nothing to worry about from me. I may use PR Master to do perhaps a half-dozen isolated, single queries per week. Since our site has no competition (it's all unique content), I have no reason to do the typical SEO thing and flood Google with inquiries by using some sort of automated program.

But look at the larger issue.

The problem isn't PR Master. While the URL checksom may be too sophisticated for me to crack, it appears that for a given URL the checksum never changes. You don't have to crack the checksum to automate inquiries. All you have to do is use Junkbuster or something, and collect a list of checksums for the sites you want to track. Then you can plug this list into a program and get the PR back. Surely you aren't going to claim that I have no right to use Junkbuster to see what your toolbar is sending to Google.

Google's initial decision to strip out most of the useful resolution on the toolbar PR was the correct one, from your perspective. But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Once you set up a system whereby this low-res PR can be fetched from Google, you should forget about programs like PR Master. I think it was out of bounds for you to request that the author of PR Master pull his program. It would have been more ethical to fix the situation on your end.

I believe this gets into the same issues that involved that Russian programmer that Adobe asked the FBI to arrest. And the only thing that's clear from that case, at this point, is that it's always the little guy who gets screwed.

Anyway, it's between you and the author of PR Master. If he won't distribute it, then I won't either, out of respect for him. I'm glad you clued me into why his site disappeared. I hope you didn't make any threats to get him to close it down. It sounds from your description that you were reasonable and polite, and I assume that I won't be hearing anything to the contrary.

I must say, though, that the news that you tracked him down is something that worries me. Maybe we should call it the Google trackerbar instead of the Google toolbar.

I may still use PR Master for several queries per week. It's easier than worrying about what your toolbar is up to, and it's easier than using Junkbuster to collect URL checksums from sites that interest me, and writing my own socket program to use one or more of these checksums in a dialog with Google to get the current PR for that site.

By the way, this is a very interesting thread and I hope we can keep it going. You deserve credit for rising to the occasion.