aleksl - 1:37 am on Mar 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

to hyperkik, msg#81: your premise is wrong

"a typical scraper operates in a very different manner than a search engine. That is, the scraper typically produces static pages which are served to users, whereas a search engine produces pages from a database in response to a specific user inquiry."

in the end the 2 make a slightest difference. In both cases, a company scrapes other sites and serves snippets of them in response to a query. The only difference here is that user usually goes directly to SE, but through a SE to scraper. The result is an HTML page that is served to the user, irrelevant to the server technology (in fact, a scraper site is likely to serve results from a database as well).

It is a rethorical debate as per which results are more relevant, search engine's or scraper's.

[edit]
Think about this:
- you don't like a scraper site because they appear above you in serps, thus you can't get free traffic
- you pay for AdWords (well, that is if you have any sort of business model besides "me and my hobby site") i.e. for traffic from SE, which is no different than JoesScraperSite
- if JoesScraperSite would bring you considerable "free" traffic, you'd be happy (admit it)
- if JoesScraperSite becomes more popular then Google (can it...can it...? think MSN), would you pay for traffic from it? Probably yes, as it will become "new SE".

So the issue is what - size, and the fact that Google itself is not in SERP (duh, user goes there AUTOMATICALLY, so IT IS technically in SERPs).
[/edit]

Once Google went public, it is fair to say that they as well serve SERPs "for profit", thus violating "fair use" and their own AdWords TOS.

PS not a scraper here