Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data (searchengineland.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:
-Circumvented Google's security measures and industry-standard crawling controls.
-Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed.
-Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to scrape content at scale.
-Took licensed content from Search features, including images and real-time data, and resold it for profit.
What Google is saying. "Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override [crawling] directives and give sites no choice at all," Google wrote, calling the alleged scraping "brazen" and "unlawful." Google said SerpApi's activity "increased dramatically over the past year." [...] If Google wins, reliable SERP data could become harder to get, more expensive, or both -- especially for teams that rely on tools powered by services like SerpApi. As AI already reduces clicks and transparency, Google now appears intent on making it even harder for brands to understand how Search works, how they appear in results, and how to measure success.
-Circumvented Google's security measures and industry-standard crawling controls.
-Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed.
-Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to scrape content at scale.
-Took licensed content from Search features, including images and real-time data, and resold it for profit.
What Google is saying. "Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override [crawling] directives and give sites no choice at all," Google wrote, calling the alleged scraping "brazen" and "unlawful." Google said SerpApi's activity "increased dramatically over the past year." [...] If Google wins, reliable SERP data could become harder to get, more expensive, or both -- especially for teams that rely on tools powered by services like SerpApi. As AI already reduces clicks and transparency, Google now appears intent on making it even harder for brands to understand how Search works, how they appear in results, and how to measure success.
What is it? (Score:1)
The end of the article says that if Google wins their lawsuit then serp data will be harder to obtain.
What is serp data and what would we want it for?
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It is the definition of irony by example (Score:5, Interesting)
"A juxtaposition of what, on the surface, appears to be the case with what is actually the case", as the Wikipedia tells us.
google, which built its empire on bypassing security protections to scrape data, which it then showed to the users, is angry that someone shrewder is using the same approach - despite the many cases in court where the same google argued the exactly opposite point.
Re:It is the definition of irony by example (Score:5, Funny)
"We stole it first!"
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... If Google wins, reliable SERP data could become harder to get, more expensive, or both -- especially for teams that rely on tools powered by services like SerpApi...
And what teams are these? The teams that are always in my email box with awful grammar telling me about my "ERRORS SEO GOOGLE" and how they can fix it for $99?
Surprised it took this long (Score:5, Interesting)
I've wondered how they hadn't been sued before.
Re:Surprised it took this long (Score:4, Informative)
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Yuep. The TLDR for existing US case law is basically that anything publicly available on the open web
Yes and Google probably benefits from this precedent more than any other company.. They're running a frickin search engine. They hardly ever Ask or Get proper permission for scraping anything. Companies who publish News in particular could have massive claims against sites like google News for pulling their articles and displaying it on Google's site. Not only unauthorized scraping, but appropriation.
If
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Indeed. And the other thing is that a reference decision here could pretty much kill the LLM industry. While that clearly would be a good thing, the respective players, including Google, do not want that. So they have to make a pretty weak case just to make sure the respective ruling does not apply to their own massive piracy.
Is capitalism holding progress back? (Score:1)
What if engineers were freed from working for "be evil" finance guys so they could develop software they wanted to use and share it because they got a generous, inflation-proofed basic income?
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I'm sure the highest-paid engineers have no desire to be freed.
Generous basic income is an oxymoron. Basic income is supposed to be basic, not generous. Basic income still needs to be funded through taxes, and requires a productive economy that generates tax revenue, and produces goods and services that are worth buying.
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Basic does not mean "little" but it means "No strings attached".
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Nothing of the concept implies little. It only implies, that there is the same floor for everyone and you can built up on that and increase it arbitrarily (given you can provide something that's in demand). The idea to keep it low is capitalist and in particular of the people who seam to be the ones where UBI is (indirectly) collected, even though UBI itself is not anti-capitalist at all.
The dream of many is, that we eventually will have machines do the work and don't need that much people to work for money
Re: Is capitalism holding progress back? (Score:1)
"Basic income still needs to be funded through taxes,"
Why, when the Fed can print money faster than prices rise? How disruptive to the Quantity theory of money is the fact that base money has increased some 600% since 2008 while cumulative inflation has increased about 50%? Does that not represent a sizeable increase in real purchasing power?
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And from where did those numbers come? They don't at all match what I can find elsewhere. M2 is about 3x what it was in 2008 ($7 trillion and change -> $22 and change), 2x if adjusted for inflation. Where did you get 600%?
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No. Capitalism is an excellent system when it is coupled with a social safety net, decent regulation, and proper workers' rights.
Unfettered capitalism where all that matters is the bottom line, regulation is seen as evil, workers are expendable, and ethics be damned... that's what's fucking us over right now.
Re: Is capitalism holding progress back? (Score:2)
Why won't capitalists buy the regulators, because poor voters hate being regulated too?
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Or did you mean like what Steves Jobs and Wozniak did? Or Allen and Gates? Or Zuckerberg and... I don't know, I didn't see the movie.
Monopoly Behavior (Score:2)
Il really trying ting to understand whatâ(TM) theyâ(TM)re alleging that hasnâ(TM)t been standard practice (even by Google) for literally as long as the web has existed.
Honestly, this sounds like textbook monopoly behavior.
And so? (Score:2)
But where is the harm? I don't see anywhere in the article where Google even alleges harm was caused.
Google suing over data theft is hilarious (Score:2)
To quote the Princess Bride: You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen!
Oh no (Score:5, Funny)
"Rules for thee not for me" (Score:2)
Wow ... (Score:2)
First I doubt that the search page contains much that is Google's copyright and second they are currently not in the position to complain about others scraping content.
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And this is probably not about search competition, but about AI. Everyone can (and many do) run a LLM-Service cheaply. What comes one expensive very fast is integrating search, because you cannot just scrape Google without tricks so you need to pay them for an API key to get the same results SerpApi is scraping (and also selling to API consumers).
API prices (Openrouter):
Small LLM: $0.03 per Million tokens
Search: $4/1000 requests
When you run your own "ChatGPT@home" using API-Providers, search integration qui
Pot calling the kettle black (Score:3)
What's The Word? (Score:2)
Hypocrisy?
Irony?
Asininity?
SerpApi snooping (Score:2)