Yes, if I wanted to put a nice HTML interface over the query results then I would still end up with the same problem where some combinatoric explosion of query parameters to the `/search` endpoint, most of which are cache misses, leads to many many TBs of network egress.
Sure, but now you're moving the site from "Free data presented in a pleasant way to view" to a "pay-as-you-go database". Your audience shifts dramatically, and you lose the ability to share the data you're trying to present.
Because the crawlers would still have hammered their site, though.
(The GP post doesn’t actually meaningfully address the issue being raised. Adding BigQuery or whatever would not change the fact that (a) they already offered a method of getting all of the data in a cost effective way, and (b) the issue was that the crawlers hammered the site hard enough to make it economically unviable.)
The comment I’m speaking of was from a different user, and it’s giving a strong smell that both users are bots unfortunately. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s a coincidence those exact strings of characters were formed in isolation from each other in the same thread. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s a red flag