Damn! Euan just pointed out that our "grabimg" utility here on Mad Props no longer works. We coded up a small ASP.NET utility a few years ago which, given a single parameter, would perform an image search on Google and return a random thumbnail from the results. It made decorating our blog posts easy, since we'd be able to insert some HTML like <img src="/grabimg?image=vista" mce_src="/grabimg?image=vista"> and a random image of Vista would be inserted.

Well, it has stopped working in the past few days because Google have changed the way they display the search results on their image search page. Instead of plain old HTML, they're now using javascript and rendering the thumbnails dynamically. It's more or less impossible for us to predictably scrape the results.

That's a real shame. If anyone knows of an "open" image search site that we might be able to use in place of Google, let me know!