The Google poem generator uses a standard server-side component to get the desired Google pages in the background. The pages are then parsed according to pre- and user-defined parameters. The techniques involved include Microsoft IIS5 web server and Active Server Page 3.0 scripting engine with VBScript. Please note that the parsing is based on knowledge about the present Google html, so if they change their presentation logic, the generator is bound to produce "unpredictable results" ;-).

Note on October 15, 2005. Lately, the Generator has not always been able to retrieve the intended result pages, having been served with a Google captcha page instead – something which results in verse like this one.

According to Google Security (I've been corresponding with them, and they've been most helpful) the captcha page is served when the search engine encounters a quick spike in traffic. The purpose of this is, of course, to "help to determine whether traffic is coming from automated robot software or individual users".

While I don’t have Google's confirmation on it yet, it seems to me that we are dealing with the same restrictions applied to the use of the Google API's in the context of the free beta program launched in 2003. The applications using the free API's are restricted to 1000 individual searches per day – while with us, the serving of the captcha page seems to have been at its highest around October 4,5, and 6, when the number of Google Poem searches per day topped 1000.

Still, I believe the Generator not be an "automated robot" in the strict sense. There are no automated searches, only the 10 to 20 display pages per each search are retrieved mechanically. Thus, I aim to continue my negotiations with Google, in the hope to get their agreement to exempt the Generator from the 1000 search per day restriction. This would seem to be in the interests of both sides – the Generator being, after all, as I wrote to the guys at the world's favorite search engine, "a collective artistic celebration to, and reflection on, the great revolution in the structures of information delivery and retrieval that Google is so much part of".

Meanwhile, let's try to live with the occasional captcha-based poems. After all, they have their own beauty, too.