Google sues SerpApi for illegally scraping search results
Google has sued tech company SerpApi, claiming that scraping and reselling search results violates Google's terms and conditions and the law.
Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping
Google lobs lawsuit at search result scraping firm SerpApi - Ars Technica
SerpApi is a company that handles APIs for various search engines, including Google, and claims to be able to explore the 'bottom' of search results that would not be possible by simply searching using the Google search box.
Google shows millions of search results, but you can't actually see them all - GIGAZINE
However, SerpApi went beyond simply providing an API. It also scraped and resold Google search results. This practice violates not only Google's terms of service but also the law by 'circumventing security measures that protect the copyrighted content of others.'
According to Google's general counsel, Halima Derain Prado, Google follows industry-standard crawling protocols and respects websites' instructions about how to crawl their content. However, 'stealth scrapers' like SerpApi ignore these instructions and don't give websites any choice.
SerpApi circumvents Google's security measures by using 'illegal backdoor' methods such as impersonation, large-scale botnet attacks, and frequent crawler name changes to obtain entire content. It also resells real-time data from Google's knowledge panels and search functions, which are licensed by Google, for a fee.
Prado said the circumvention of security measures led him to file a lawsuit as a last resort to stop the fraud.
In addition, news site Ars Technica points out that because Google does not provide an official API for search, SerpApi has been used as a means to obtain search result pages, so this lawsuit could be a tailwind for search engines that provide official APIs such as Bing and Brave.
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in Web Service, Posted by logc_nt