I use Google extensively as a professional legal researcher. I hope they have an "adult content" filter, or I could be getting some interesting looks over the ol' cube.

Over at Metafilter some time ago, someone named yarf wrote that "it's clearly a copyright violation when some company makes a copy of my work and profits from that copy. Google is a for-profit company and makes money from advertising. Their cache service is making a copy of my content, without my permission, and serving it to users, again, without my permission." Is that strictly true, does it matter, and would adding thumbnail image copies simply be an additional infringement on a website author's copyright?

I remember a search engine doing this some time ago, like 2-3 years ago. Or tried to do it, rather...I don't think it worked so well for them. Anyone else remember this or who the company was?

Also, the thumbnails thing reminds me of Photodisc's (http://www.photodisc.com) image search from 4-5 years ago. The user could select an image and the system would find similar images based not on the subject matter, but on the composition of the image: brightness, color, contrast, subject orientation (vertical, horizontal), etc. It was extremely useful, one of the best uses of search I'd ever seen, but they discontinued it a couple years ago for some reason. :(