Blacklisted by Google's Geolocation Service

banned

Several months ago, I described how one could use Google Gears to easily add Geolocation and GPS to their Windows Mobile applications. Basically, this is a trick that would work with any embedded browser by adding and scripting a DOM element, or by using my unsavory window.location hack when that is not possible (as is in the case of Pocket IE).

I was recently trying to reuse this code, and I noticed that the Geolocation sample page I had hosted was not working on Windows Mobile anymore; the service seemed to be returning an invalid response. I navigated to that same URL in Google Chrome and Firefox and it worked fine. I then tried navigating to the Gears Geolocation sample in Pocket IE, and that worked as well. I verified that I still had the most up to date code hosted on my domain. Still no luck, as the code had not changed.

So out of curiosity, I hosted the geolocation page on a separate domain and navigated to it within Pocket IE. 'Lo and behold, it starts working. So mentally, I constructed this chart in my mind:

  Pocket IE Google Chrome Firefox
code.google.com Works Works Works
koushikdutta.blurryfox.com Broken! Works Works
supersecretdomain.com Works Works Works

My conclusion? Google has blacklisted my domain! And, to be honest, I'm not really sure why. I'm using their sample code on my domain to get geolocation data, but using the results outside of the context of the browser.

Congratulations Google, you have earned the first honorary YouBastard tag on my blog!

 

Edit:

Google Gears EULA. I haven't violated it as far as I can see, but they do reserve the right to cut off access to the service at their whim.

3 comments:

Alex Kovar said...

Your such a rebel.. using their geolocation service.. Guess thats what you get for living on the wild side.

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

Dutta G
U R Gr8