An open source Google – without the ads

With the hope of returning at least one corner of the web to its non-commercial roots, Google watcher Daniel Brandt, who curates the NameBase archive, has released the source code to a Google scraper. Brandt has been making an ad-free proxy available for two years using Google’s little known minimal “ie” interface. By using this proxy, users bypass both Google’s notorious “2038” cookie (that’s when it expires) and the text ads.