To Vision Jinx's excellent reply, I would add a couple of thoughts. First, if the searches are triggered when a student submits the document or the teacher hits a button, rather than on a cron job, etc., I suspect you would be okay. The default SearchControl which Google built for use with the API can be set up to run multiple searches simultaneously, but as long as there is some form of user interaction (e.g., the user visits the page or submits the search query), it falls within the terms of service. And second, I do believe that, in the past, Google has worked with people developing such systems. I do not know what the terms of those previous arrangements has been, but it may be worth checking out. I will contact a couple of people at Google to draw their attention to this thread.
All of that said, as Vision Jinx noted of himself, I am not a legal expert, either. If you have any doubts about any of this, I would strongly recommend consulting someone who is. Jeremy R. Geerdes Effective website design & development Des Moines, IA For more information or a project quote: http://jgeerdes.home.mchsi.com [email protected] If you're in the Des Moines, IA, area, check out Debra Heights Wesleyan Church! On Feb 16, 2010, at 4:50 AM, Vision Jinx wrote: > Hello, > > First off, I am not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV so I would > always suggest that you seek professional legal council. > > With that being said, I do believe the APIs can not be used in an > automated fashion and would need to be the result of an end user, > meaning you can't use automated scripts to make the queries. > > But again, please read over the terms of use and see if any of them > apply to you, if there is any grey area that your not sure about this > is where I would most definitely ask a lawyer. > > Additionally, there are quite a few plagiarism services on the > Internet that I have seen, you can maybe also check some of them out > if looking for an alternative. (Not meaning they plagiarize, but scan > the Internet for plagiarism) > > Cheers! > Vision Jinx > > On Feb 16, 3:26 am, Dmitry Shevchenko <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Greetings, I am a researcher from Russia, and I am working on >> improving MOODLE - a well known educational system -http://moodle.org. One >> of the major problems we are dealing with is >> plagiarism - students often copy works from Internet. There is a >> special module, CROT >> (http://www.siberiasoft.info/index.php/features.html), developed for >> MOODLE by Sergey Butakov, that allows to perform both local and global >> searches. However, it uses for global search MSN. We modified the CROT >> code in order to use Google instead of MSN. We used as a base the code >> in the samples for PHP >> -http://code.google.com/intl/ru-RU/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/. >> Everything works fine. >> Here is the algorithm that we use (without too much details): >> 1. Split the document into separate parts of fixed size. >> 2. For each part find the links and store them in a hash table. >> 3. Download the pages for the most popular links. >> 4. Compare it with the original document and calculate the measure of >> similarity (scientific part). >> 5. If the computed value is above specified threshold, report it to >> the teacher on a special status page (see the screenshot 1). >> The teacher can then look at the downloaded documents to compare them >> (see the screenshot 2). >> Everything works fine from the technical point of view. However, we're >> not sure about terms of usage. Is it legal to use google search >> service in such a way? We can place Google logo on the pages involved >> in this process, that global search is supported by Google ajax api >> (instead of bing service, as on screenshot 1). If not, what exactly do >> we need to change (or, if it's completely impossible, we will disable >> this new feature on our site). >> With respect, >> Shevchenko Dmitry. >> >> Screenshot1.JPG >> 60KViewDownload >> >> Screenshot2.JPG >> 147KViewDownload > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google AJAX APIs" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/google-ajax-search-api?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google AJAX APIs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-ajax-search-api?hl=en.
