Today, Google took the next step and stopped the aforementioned program from being able to render the search engine results by changing code on its results pages - just at the time when WebPosition Gold was due to issue a fix dealing with the change. The change occurred overnight - was this deliberate given WebPosition Gold's imminent return? It's a question that WebTrends, who owns WebPosition, must be asking itself.
The Mountain View giant takes great pride in advocating good, ethical usage of its search engine. That's why it changed its PPC user inputs to exploit not just the highest bidder for a keyphrase but also incorporated Quality Scores to ensure that PPC clients were treated fairly. It's also why the company doesn't like search engine scrapers - to the length of naming what it saw as its biggest offender in its ToS.
The minor coding change, which involved switching the link code for organic results from < h2 > to < h3 >, was enough to cause a lot of problems for legitimate tools that add position counters to search results - including some Mozilla Firefox extensions.
The Firefox issue is a tricky one - Google is a big Firefox fan and many of the extensions affected don't violate the search engine's ToS. Rather than directly querying Google like certain banned software, these Firefox extensions work locally, adding a number beside each manual search result rather than using up Google's resources.
To be cut off without warning must be a bit of a blow for the developers of the various extensions, given Mozilla's amicable relationship with Google. However, can we really expect Google to consider plug-ins and extensions like the Firefox ones when changing its code? With so many users, Google surely can't stay on top of everybody that designs different styles of the same programs and its black or white, all-or-nothing approach is probably the only way it'll get things done.
It's nothing personal, Mozilla. On the other hand, we can't help but imagine one crafty Google Engineer's amusement at changing the HTML code just as WebPosition was about to apply its fix...
