How to find the owner of an application

[Kyle Jensen]

Hi -

How can I find out who owns a particular application?

The app does not use a custom domain, so DNS/registration info is no
help. I noticed a app that is mirroring all my content and is showing
up next to me in search results. So, clearly, I'd like to ask them to
stop doing that.

Long time GAE user, Kyle

[Barry Hunter]

Doesnt help you for the results already there (although it should help
to make them disappear with time) - and its a cat and mouse game if
they try changing appid.

but you can block them from reading your content. I guess they must be
using URLFetch to grab your content. The User-Agent on such calls
include the appid of the calling app - just selectively block on that
;)

(and yes I know it doesnt answer your actual question)

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[Stephen Johnson]

This issue has surfaced before. What is the purpose behind them doing this? (sorry if that's a stupid question)

[Stephen Johnson]

I mean the individuals doing the mirroring. What do they get out of it?

[Barry Hunter]

They might even be doing it unintentionally.

The number of 'open proxies' on AppEngine - is very high. If someone
uses said proxy against your site, the link can end up in a search
engine, and because the proxy rewrite links, search engine crawlers
get a whole new site to crawl.
- ideally the proxy should be blocking crawlers - at the very least.
(and in a perverse way because the proxy site hosts content from many
domains (ie subjects) - it can end up getting quite a diverse
portfolio of content)

The intentional ones, are doing to to increase exposure to their site
mainly. They can put AdSence on the pages (even just rewriting the
adsence it of the original content producer) - or similar advertising
to raise money.
- basically they steal trafffic from your site, by stealing the
content - ie very little work.

(speculating on Kyle's case, as we dont know the specifics ;)

[Stephen Johnson]

Thanks Barry for the great explanation. Then I wonder if instead of blocking when it is detected but to send a big splash page as the response for all requests with the correct link and a message. I guess like advertising.

[Jay Young]

Something like this came up a few weeks ago.  I don't remember the details exactly, but I think the issue was that anyone with a Google Apps domain can add App Engine apps to their domain.  Accessing the site through that GA domain still hits your site, it just looks like it's coming from a different domain.  Have you confirmed that hitting this "mirror" does not cause any requests on your own app?

[Kyle Jensen]

@Jay - Regardless if the request hits my application in a "live"
manner, the content is indexed by search engines, which is my real
complaint. I can certainly block them using some WSGI middleware (I'm
on python) by the appid. However, I'd prefer to ask the guy just to
stop scrapping.

@Barry - there's no ads on there now but he's competing with me in
some long tail searches. My site is about patent news (snore) so I
rank quite highly for various things like new patent litigations. Now
he shows up along side me with my content. Clearly not perfect.

Thanks guys! Will be blocking...which is not ideal. I can't believe
there's no way to know who owns an app. Seems like it would encourage
abuse.

-Kyle

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Kyle, 

We've seen billing issues filed for this situation. If you file one, it'll help us improve overall search quality. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do for you in the short term, as proxies are not against our ToS. In the long term, however, there is a massive effort to overhaul our search quality in general:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html

Search quality is a problem that we're looking to improve across the board; it bothers me that mirrors of App Engine groups content often outranks the source Google group. 

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blogger: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

[Kyle Jensen]

Thanks @Ikai!

A few quick thoughts:

* It's not your responsibility to police copyright: mirrors shouldn't
be against the TOS.
* Definitely it would discourage poor behavior on GAE if an app could
be resolved to an email address.
* Same is true of a flagging system for apps, perhaps behind a
captcha.

What do you mean by filing a billing issue? I'm unfamiliar with that.

Sincerely, Kyle


On Jan 26, 1:52 pm, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ikai.l+gro...@google.com>
wrote:

> Kyle,
>
> We've seen billing issues filed for this situation. If you file one, it'll
> help us improve overall search quality. Unfortunately, there's nothing we
> can do for you in the short term, as proxies are not against our ToS. In the
> long term, however, there is a massive effort to overhaul our search quality
> in general:
>

> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engin...

> > google-appengi...@googlegroups.com<google-appengine%2Bunsubscrib e...@googlegroups.com>
> > .

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

This form right here:

http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=AppEngineBillingSupport

We'll see what we can do for you by contacting the owners of the application in question, but we're not going to be able to provide you with their contact information directly.

One of the members of this group emailed me off list to report a proxy FARM. This is clearly against our ToS, as it is a violation of our rule to prevent multiple applications acting as one.

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blogger: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengi...@googlegroups.com.