If you are a fan of Lockergnome or Chris Pirillo, you have probably noticed the sudden prevalence of Gada.be links on not only Pirillo's sites but those of his Lockergnome lackeys. If you look around Gada.be a bit, you may be wondering whether it is a site providing a useful service or it's just another glorified scraping site. It appears that Google has settled on the latter.

The basic framework of Gada.be is that it uses wildcard subdomains to fill any keyword.gada.be with search results from a variety of search engines. These results are returned in a low-bandwidth manner that is designed to be fast and simple for not only dial-up users but those on portable devices.

These results are naturally returned with their fair share of Google AdSense ads along the side. Nobody can blame Pirillo for wanting to score some cash, but the site looks just like many of the sites you will find linked by search engines that scrape content from legitimate sites in an effort to appear useful.

Since the premiere of Gada.be was announced, I've reserved judgement for the most part. It looked suspicious to me, but I reserved judgement under the assumption that I was missing something. Judging by Google's reaction, my assumption may have been wrong.

While Pirillo vacationed with his very public lover, Google elected to entirely remove Gada.be from its search results. Not that they are blocking their ads from being served, mind you, but they aren't helping out with an referrals from their primary search results.

One of the problems with Gada.be that has been pointed out is that it does nothing to prevent trademarks from being used in these subdomains, which is a classic technique used by fraudulent sites looking for any advertising clicks they can get. It also does nothing to prevent adult content from being displayed (particularly in the Flickr results), a blatant violation of the AdSense program's terms.

This isn't Pirillo's first time to violate Google's TOS and it hasn't hurt him in the past. Google does appear, however, to be cracking down as he no longer includes links to pre-generated AdSense for Search results next to the title of every Lockergnome article. While Google has apparently not cut Gada.be from generating AdSense revenue, removing it from their search results certainly doesn't bode well for this new site.