How does it work to get data from google without using a google service?

[basings]

Following statement seems contradicting:

Lingva scrapes through GTranslate and retreives the translation without using any Google-related service

[basings]

line 15 in translate.ts fetches data from google. Hence, Lingva uses google services

    const res = await fetch(
        `https://translate.google.com/m?sl=${parsed.source}&tl=${parsed.target}&q=${encodeURIComponent(query)}`,
        {
            headers: {
                "User-Agent": new UserAgent().toString()
            }
        }
    ).catch(
        () => null
    );

[basings]

If you selfhost it, you just have another front-end, google still receives every request and tracks you via IP.

What about caching the results so that each subsequent run won't be tracked by google?

[treuks]

i'm not the developer or related to this project in any way shape or form, but what they meant by without using any Google-related service, is that this translation frontend works without using the google translate api, which costs money to use

[thedaviddelta]

Hi and thanks for your interest in the project.

Lingva works the same as Invidious, Nitter or Kainet. It doesn't use an official API with its own API key, which are used by these companies for tracking requests, but it makes an standard GET request to the own official page as a normal user would do from a web browser (indeed Invidious or Kainet use a private API but it's the same concept) and scrapes the returned HTML for getting the results.

In addition, these scrapers always make the requests from the backend. This way, they always come from the same "virtual user" (our backend's IP), without giving any info of the users that made the original request to them.

That's what we (and every scraper) mean by without using any Google-related service.

Regards, David.

[basings]

@TheDavidDelta ok, thx. The wording is incorrect. Lingva is using a google service. The user does not use google.

I am just trying to help. If you want you can write anything on that page of course

[thedaviddelta]

Yep, don't worry @basings. I didn't think about it but, even thought we don't strictly use any Google service but a public webpage, it's true it may be a bit misleading. I will take a look to a more proper wording after some interesting changes I have planed for the future.

Thanks, David.