Is this legal?

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wildwobby
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Is this legal?

Post by wildwobby »

Is it legal to make a website where one part of it involves using curl+regex to scrape stock quotes from google finance?
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

Check their terms of service: http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html

Since I'm not seeing an API on their code pages, I'll guess they may take issue in scraping.

I probably would say it's not illegal per se, but not very nice or cool.
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wtf
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Post by wtf »

why boter with scraping/regex when you can http://xmethods.net/
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veridicus
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Post by veridicus »

IANAL, but can tell you that Google has a license to the information either directly or indirectly from the stock markets. Stock markets aren't public services and their data is owned by them. Therefore you can be pretty sure there are restrictions to scraping any of their data.
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Maugrim_The_Reaper
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Post by Maugrim_The_Reaper »

Actually the stock market doesn't necessarily own the data - remember it's an open regulated market so the data *must* be published by the stock exchange. Chances are the restrictions concern access to their underlying systems. Just as Yahoo can license access to their system, but not ownership of the data being served.

In any case, scrapping is not cool. Yes, it would work. Yes, it's probably legal. But try to find a free data source before wasting Yahoo's bandwidth for your own gain.
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

But try to find a free data source before wasting Yahoo's bandwidth for your own gain.
Is that not the illegal bit? It's using Yahoo's/Google's/Someone else's service without their consent, and presumable without credit?
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

veridicus wrote:IANAL
For those that do not speak AOL (Abbreviated Online Language), this means I Am Not A Lawyer. I know it is a lot to spell out, but hey, I can take one for the team...

As far as illegal... If it is data coming from a source that has a registration or fee charged for the service, you are violating their user agreement. Even if you are not violating a user agreement or breaking the law, it is still being rude to gank someone else's content without their permission. That truly is just wrong.
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

I would have thought there is a user agreement even for sites that do not have a registration/fee.
wildwobby
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Post by wildwobby »

hmm, well im not expecting much trafic, but what if I made the php randomly choose which site to scrape from (msn, yahoo, google, cnbc, etc...) for every query therby distributing the "load"...


Already have a little mini-test:
http://rwphoto.thepeopleshost.com/gf.php?q=adbe
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s.dot
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Post by s.dot »

wildwobby wrote:hmm, well im not expecting much trafic, but what if I made the php randomly choose which site to scrape from (msn, yahoo, google, cnbc, etc...) for every query therby distributing the "load"...


Already have a little mini-test:
http://rwphoto.thepeopleshost.com/gf.php?q=adbe
I'd say that's just digging you a deeper hole :P
Set Search Time - A google chrome extension. When you search only results from the past year (or set time period) are displayed. Helps tremendously when using new technologies to avoid outdated results.
wildwobby
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Post by wildwobby »

aight I wonder how I can legally get it... I made it ajax-powered too.
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

Legally, you need to subscribe to the various exchanges' feeds, typically.
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