Isn't that against their terms of service or something?

How's this different/better from some kind of anonymizing proxy like tor?

With things like tor, it can be a little slower, especially if you just want to do a single search. With this, we've added in the feature so you can add it to your Firefox/IE7 search box and then easily use it right from the browser. So it's the same idea, we're just focusing on this one feature for the good of the community.

The other feature we have is endless scrolling, so if you search and can't find it in the first few results, you can just keep scrolling and we'll continue to populate it. That's something not many others have.

Why is this legal? I thought Google no longer has a search api.

The thing is, we're not making money from it in any way (which is why I call it a pseudo' startup), and because of that fair use can apply. Also, think about google. They scrape the entire web and profit by serving that as content...

Fair use certainly doesn't apply. You're using Google search technology (which btw, involves a bit more than 'scraping' the web) and stripping out the ads (their source of revenue). Expect a cease and desist letter soon.

Fair use doesn't apply, but if you can get your hands on an old API key it will still work. I built something similar (here: http://www.paulbutler.org/archives/endless-google-search/) and I just used an old Google API key, so I don't violate their TOS.

It makes me wonder though, since you can't make any money with it, how do you plan to pay for hosting fees? Surely you eventually intend to profit, what will you do then?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the API is limited to 1000 searches per day correct?

No, I don't plan on profiting from this. This is a very low impact system and I don't mind footing the bill for the hosting costs as long as it's of value to the community.

I see, good work then.

You're right, I forgot about the API limit.