5.3 is a little fuzzy — after all, all Google Maps mashups involve scripts. My interpretation is that the action to view an airport *is* initiated by a human, and the script just adjusts the view. Most of the time, there is no auto zoom: it happens only when an airport is in a remote area (such as the Arctic) where there are no satellite tiles available at the default zoom level, so nothing would otherwise appear on the screen. There is no zoom once the server actually delivers satellite tiles.

Similarly debatable cases would include someone clicking on a link that opens two or three maps on the same page (one human action = three maps), a mashup that does a map slideshow of your trip, showing the map of each city for 10 seconds before moving to the next one, or a map that animated (say) Magellan’s route by drawing an animated line and moving the map to follow it. I don’t *think* Google means to ban apps like these — it’s just a matter of bot-detection software that’s not quite ready for Prime Time. I’ve noticed in the help forums that some places where lots of people access Google Maps through the same firewall proxy have lost access to Google Maps completely, and some have even lost Google Search, so it’s a widespread problem.

None of this is to take away from my gratitude to Google for providing these services — I’m very much in their debt, and just want to help make things better.

After all, your program only hits Google a few extra times per user, but it adds up, and where is Google supposed to draw the line between that and an attempt to download a whole lot of imagery for who-knows-what purposes?

I so, so don’t speak for Google.