Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

ccdrnsf about 2 hours ago 16 commentsRead Article on techdirt.com

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Discussion (16 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

binarymax•about 1 hour ago

I'd be more OK with this if Google had a good API for their search results. But they've deprecated it, and now there is no alternative. So I'll continue to use 3rd parties that scrape Google results, until they change their mind.

mark_l_watson•29 minutes ago

I agree, then need to bring back Nelson Minar’s old search API, or something like it.

Google does supply search grounding with Gemini API calls, and that is handy, but not general enough.

jonatron•about 1 hour ago

It's quite important that SERPs are scrapeable, because they keep advertising scams like ETA/ESTA sites: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957

Terr_•5 minutes ago

[delayed]

thisislife2•about 1 hour ago

I am somewhat confused - does this mean we can all now legally scrape Google search results?

rgrieselhuber•about 1 hour ago

Always has been

lazide•39 minutes ago

Legally and ‘they won’t do everything they can to stop you’ are not the same thing of course.

beloch•27 minutes ago

This ruling might feel good viscerally, but it also reinforces Googles own scraping as perfectly legal. At its inception, Google probably viewed this lawsuit as win-win. Either they successfully sue a competitor into oblivion or establish a precedent that will protect themselves in the future. Google lost, but they still won.

echelon•21 minutes ago

Google has no moat anymore.

- Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore.

- Coding models make doing extreme depth of work possible.

- Hoards of unemployed engineers now have access to 10x coding utilities and are looking for things to do. They will start clawing away at Google products.

- Just the other day, someone cloned Google Gsuite and it looked awesome

- Drive and Search will also be fungible products

- I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same.

- Chrome can probably be replaced (Firefox gained a whole percentage point last month)

I don't think Google is safe anymore.

Two caveats that I'll give them:

- YouTube still has network effects and probably can't be dislodged

- Google cloud isn't going anywhere

bstsb•7 minutes ago

> Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore.

bear in mind we're on Hacker News. Google's market share is still above 90% - in almost any other market this would be a ridiculous monopoly.

hommelix•10 minutes ago

> - I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same.

Maybe look into contributing to existing alternatives like PostmarketOS.

https://postmarketos.org/

BeetleB•14 minutes ago

> Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore.

What do they use?

Of all my tech friends, colleagues, I'm the only one who uses Kagi. Another person uses searx. Everyone else uses Google.

Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.

aqfamnzc•9 minutes ago

Let me tell you about this new little-known technology that's been gaining traction in the last few years...

worik•11 minutes ago

> Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.

Me, almost, too.

I have some friends using duckduckgo - not many and only until Google is the default again...

rebasedoctopus•8 minutes ago

are your peers me, myself, and I? that is a wild claim. I'll start asking around but I don't think I could find one person that says they don't use google search anymore

xbar•about 2 hours ago

Hypocrisy-rich.

super256•about 1 hour ago

If only GPT wouldn't refuse my requests to write a crawler for $site. :(

paul7986•36 minutes ago

What about them taking content for their AI summaries? Have they created a system that gets content owners and creators paid in this regard yet?

guardiangod•about 2 hours ago

“You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly."

throwaway87543•about 1 hour ago

Google crawling respects robots.txt and doesn't break capcha. It is easy to tell Google to piss off. SerpAPI fully relies on end-user proxies distributed like malware (in LG tv apps for instance), it has no other way it could function because it exclusively ingests data from sources that tell it to stop. If you wanted to scrape a bot friendly site, you wouldn't need SerpApi

horsawlarway•6 minutes ago

I'm vaguely sympathetic to this argument.

But only vaguely. Google uses its monopoly position in advertising to basically ensure that you allow them to scrape your site (or if not you personally, the majority of revenue driving sites). They have the benefit of being allowed by default.

They also then scrape again at the user level for users operating chrome.

They also conveniently ignore global blocks for their adsbots (you have to specifically name them to block them).

If you're not Google, you likely don't have this luxury.

My preference would be that governments force search indexes to be public. The exact mechanisms for this can be debated.

Varelion•about 1 hour ago

This sums up every single bit of AI "progress" since 2022.

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

Source:

Google vs. SerpApi: The Court Granted Our Motion to Dismiss

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995411