Scroogle is back. Thanks to the help from three Scroogle users, I learned that there is a way to access that same simple interface with an extra parameter in the URL by using www.google.com/search (that param is &output=ie), instead of through the former static page www.google.com/ie without the extra parameter. It appears that both methods amount to the same thing.

I apologize for the title, "Scroogle has been blocked." It was in an old template, afterwhich the program went on to read a current text file. In the future it will read, "Scroogle is having problems with Google." We were IP blocked by Google more than once a couple years ago, but not all of our servers were blocked at the same time and we rerouted traffic, so no one noticed. We got those blocks lifted by Google within a few days.

-- Daniel Brandt, Scroogle programmer and sysadmin; president of nonprofit public charity Public Information Resarch, Inc., owner of Scroogle.org

The Justice Department should also send a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to the University of Michigan. It's a public University, but all negotiations with Google were subject to nondisclosure requirements. That's the place where Google's book-grabbing arrogance, and the acquiescence by public-sector librarians, began in 2004. It took a freedom of information request under Michigan state law to even get a copy of the contract out of the University. In it, we learned that Google indemnified the University against all legal threats that may arise from the University's agreement to hand over all their copyrighted books to Google's scanners. Google now claims that the Settlement in nonexclusive, but that's only true if you have billions in the bank and can make the sorts of guarantees that Google made to the University of Michigan. You can read about this at www.google-watch.org/modify.html

A site that started last week, AVG Watch, is collecting the IP addresses of LinkSpanner users that visit two other sites they have. After three days, they have 21,000 addresses.