Google Sues SerpApi
Halimah DeLaine Prado (Reddit):
We filed a suit today against the scraping company SerpApi for circumventing security measures protecting others’ copyrighted content that appears in Google search results. We did this to ask a court to stop SerpApi’s bots and their malicious scraping, which violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content. This lawsuit follows legal action that other websites have taken against SerpApi and similar scraping companies, and is part of our long track record of affirmative litigation to fight scammers and bad actors on the web.
Google follows industry-standard crawling protocols, and honors websites’ directives over crawling of their content. Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override those directives and give sites no choice at all. SerpApi uses shady back doors — like cloaking themselves, bombarding websites with massive networks of bots and giving their crawlers fake and constantly changing names — circumventing our security measures to take websites’ content wholesale.
Google claims SerpApi uses hundreds of millions of fake search requests to mimic human behavior. This allows them to bypass CAPTCHAs and other automated defenses that Google uses to prevent bots from overwhelming its systems.
SerpApi sells a “Google Search API” to third parties. Google argues this is deceptive because Google does not offer a public search API for this type of data. SerpApi is essentially selling a back door to Google’s proprietary search engine.
Google argues that its security systems (like SearchGuard) are “technological measures” that control access to copyrighted work. By bypassing them, SerpApi is allegedly violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. Google claims SerpApi is violating Google’s Terms of Service, which strictly prohibit automated scraping and the use of proxies to hide one’s identity. Google alleges that SerpApi is profiting from Google’s massive investment in organizing the world’s information without contributing to the ecosystem or respecting the rules.
“Google estimates that SerpApi sends hundreds of millions of artificial search requests each day to Google. Over the last two years, that volume has increased by as much as 25,000%,” Google said.
What SerpApi has said previously. SerpApi argued that “public search data should be accessible,” framing its work as protected by the First Amendment and warning that lawsuits like Reddit’s threaten the “free and open web.”
Recent actions taken by U.S. courts, for example, have found Google illegally maintained its search monopoly. In issuing proposed remedies earlier this year, the judge noted the rapidly shifting world of search thanks to the growth of generative artificial intelligence products. “OpenAI” is mentioned (PDF) thirty times as an example of a potential disruptor. However, the judge does not mention OpenAI’s live search data is at least partially powered by SerpApi.
Previously:
- Reddit Sues SerpApi
- Social Media AI Training
- Microsoft’s Suleyman on AI Scraping
- AI Companies Ignoring Robots.txt
- Apple Intelligence Training
