You 'ivory tower' types are *so* naiive.  It's cute.  ;-)

I am not sure I would use that term for it.

Spamming is generally pushing an advertising
related message out to people who do not want it.

This (when done the 'wrong way') simply amounts
to a bit of theft of the resources of others.

& for my part, while I might hassle the thieves,
I'll bludgeon the spammers.

I think you might be well placed to use the 'legal
and free' API's currently offered!  Surely even the
small numbers of queries Google offers for free
would cover your requirement?

(In any case, from what I understand, Google simply
refuses further requests for the day if the limit
is struck - no hard feelings, and back tomorrow..)

Don't forget the there can be a few 'legalities' to the
educational side of things.  Be careful of tripping over
using someone elses code without proper attribution
or accreditation.. Plagiarism/academic misconduct.
There was a classic thread on these groups from
a chap by the name of RoboCop - he got to find
out the hard way.

Andrew T.

It's not spamming -- I don't know what the other guy was smoking when he
wrote the post you're replying to. There is NO DIFFERENCE discernible to
Google if you

a) do 10 searches during the day by typing in a Firefox window while
doing research or
b) have your computer do the searches with less/no typing on your part

Google is being "ripped off" iff you do something like:

a) use huge amounts of their bandwidth -- well in excess of a normal
user doing a bit of heavy research say, generating large numbers of
searches or delving very deeply into the result set. Fetching 10
first-pages-of-results one for each of 10 queries, whether done by one
mouse click or ten typed-in queries, has little impact on them, and of
course the one mouse click case makes it actually 10 queries instead of
11 because you mistyped one and had to do it again :)
b) or use google search results to populate your own rival "search
engine" site with revenue-generating ads or what-have-you, either by
scraping google's database or by just putting up a page with a script
that takes peoples' queries and passes them to google, then takes the
result page and replaces google's sponsored links with umpteen flashing
banner ads. Then you're using google's work output to actually compete
against google, rather than simply using google for research. That makes
a crucial difference.

Using code to drive Google lightly and for personal/educational/research
reasons rather than commercial ones doesn't seem to be evil to me,
especially if they cannot in practise distinguish it from "normal" use
anyway, as it isn't producing excessive traffic or being used to compete
against google in some way.

In fact, where do you draw the line? Firefox with manually-typed queries
is OK. Then we have Firefox with a MRU for queries; Firefox with query
guessing or autocompletion based on your current activities and
interests; Firefox with a plugin to take the result set too and
transform it e.g. to show 50 rather than 10 hits or to weed out
"supplemental results" that are usually MFA sites that really ARE
ripping off google; Firefox with a plugin to run the query of your
choice and bookmark the results every few days; ... Firefox with a
plugin to gradually build up a database of hits for various queries by
occasionally fetching the nth page of results for one of them, but you
don't publish these anywhere, just use them personally ...

I think the two things that mark a transition to being evil are causing
them excessive traffic and competing with them using their own data in
some way. (Also generating content-free MFA pages to generate revenue
via AdSense ads and SEOing them, but that's more using AdSense than
using the search engine proper, though the SEO will impact the latter
and pollute the results.)

I don't see any way to derive some kind of moral law that makes typing
something morally superior to doing it with one click, and actually
scheduling an automatic (infrequent) job or whatever actually sinful.
There's no inherent virtue in inefficiency, and computers exist to
enable automating tasks. Hyperlinks automate looking up and finding that
dusty reference or whatever; librarians may complain that they rot young
brains but the actual upshot is a gain in productivity, rather than some
kind of evil decadence setting in.

[me:]

I don't particularly want to focus on what word(s) best fit the malefaction.
I'll stick with the general purpose "abuse" (which doesn't necessarily even
imply illegality).

Here you are mentioning only one aspect of the abuse (as it might appear to
Google) -- namely overuse of their resources.  And I doubt if they are too
worried about that (within reason, of course).  But almost /any/ automated
scanning of their database is an abuse in another sense: they make that data
available to people (not machines) in order to make money off it.  Their (only,
as far as I know) source of cash is directly or indirectly from the advertising
they include with the search results.  If you don't see the advertising then
you are using their resources and data without paying for them.  How could they
/not/ want to minimise that ?

Or anything else that suggests that the search results are not being read by a
human...

Of course, they own the servers, they pay the (probably massive) network costs
and other data-centre costs, so it's up to them what they consider "fair".  If
they choose to object to people called "Chris" using their services, then
that's up to them -- I have no real right to complain -- they can be as
arbitrary as they like.  Naturally, since they want to make money, they can't
be too very arbitrary (and aren't), but by the same token, they do have good
reasons to (try to) protect their services from freeloaders.

   -- chris

Thanks. Been busy with end of year deadlines recently. Should be around
a bit more often now though.