Speaking of working with Google to keep Google hacks online, here are two artists announcing the problems they've had in working with the forces of darkness:
Cory Arcangel: Doogle "Canned". This is the exact scenario described by Ben Fino-Radin in his paper [PDF] about net art preservation. An artist's "Google hack" breaks as Google changes its code, in this case Arcangel's search engine that only searched for Doogie Howser: "Google depreciated the second API it ran on – which allowed it to pull live search results for Neil Patrick Harris – so I have decided to retire it from pulling LIVE search links." Props to Arcangel for letting an artwork die rather than sticking tubes and electrodes into it, I guess.
Paul Slocum: The Difficulty of Developing on iPhone 2G/3G without Service. Slocum needs to test an art app on various phones and "Apple won’t let me use the rather expensive little computer that I bought unless I pay for AT&T service that I don’t need." You can read his solutions at the link. My solution would be to keep "art" and "Apple" separate but then I am only steps away from Walden Pond.