Big discussion at WMW about how a scraper site is defined. Ogletree (and a few others) are of the opinion that Google and other SE’s are just bigger scrapers:

Google is a scraper site. A scraper site is any site that does not make their own content and uses a bot to crawl the web and publish snippits of other sites. Now when it is refered to here they mean some guy bought some scraper software and puts up several thousand pages with adsense on it.

I have to agree with this opinion. Not that I have any scraper sites myself (don’t know how, or I’d give it a try). Google is just bigger and gets more visitors. And just because you can opt out doesn’t change anything.

Not that I hate Google, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that it is not a scraper.

I also don’t think my sites are being hurt by scrapers. But - still I would like to see Google get them out of the serps. But can they? And without some innocent sites getting banned along with them? I came across a couple yesterday that were kind of hard to tell they were scrapers. Should be interesting to see what happens with them over the next few months.