Google preventing automated searches

It looks like there has been an increase in the number of automated searches being performed over google. And they are not happy with it.

What i was fascinated with is the google calculator. I has just started to write a script in Python for calculation related things and what i could get is that there are now less ways to do automated search over Google.


Let's have a look at how Google prevents automated searches.

If we open http://www.google.com and do a search for "35 mm in inches", what we obtain is the result. A close look at the URL pattern gives the following information.

• The new search pattern of google is

  http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=5+mm+in+inches&btnG=Google+Search&aq=0&oq=5+mm+in+in&fp=CGM4k02K5DI

  . The use of anchor tag (#hl) is interesting.
  Another interesting thing is that there are two parameteres on which the same search keyword is being fired - q and oq.
  The q is the actual query that is used to fetch the result and oq is the query that you typed. The following image makes this even more clear.
  
  


• Another interesting thing is that if we try to open the same page via Python's URLLIB2 interface, we get the google home page.
  


• Apart from that, the most famous URL pattern for any search
  

  http://www.google.com/search?q=google+search

  
  gives a 403 - Forbidden, when tried to access via Python's urllib2 interface.
  

So, it looks like Google is narrowing the way people perform automated search on its engine.

In the next couple of days, i will be trying to find out if there is still some holes left, or not and will discuss my findings here in a more elaborate manner. You could very well, follow my blog to make sure you don't miss anything. Comments most welcome.