An ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has been tracking the various advanced search result pages from Google since the Google redesign.
Back in the day, google.com/ie would let you set a special URL parameter to show 100 results on the page. Google killed it and it gave Scroogle a set back for a little while.
But webmasters and Scroogle found an alternative URL to get the same results. The alternative URL was adding on &output=ie to the Google URL.
Today, that URL also no longer works for many. It does work for me, but I guess it is a matter of time until the URL goes away. Try it yourself.
As Tedster said at WebmasterWorld, "Curses, foiled again! Time to get a script written, I guess." But as I said, Scroogle is out of business also. They wrote a message on their site saying:
We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002....
Thank you for your support during these past five years. Check back in a week or so; if we don't hear from Google by next week, I think we can all assume that Google would rather have no Scroogle, and no privacy for searchers.
What will happen is unclear. Google never particularly went after Scroogle, but they won't go out of their way to let a scrapper site do their work. Time will tell.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld& Google Blogoscoped Forums.
