Hacker News

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

131 points by cdrnsf ago | 45 comments

SoftTalker |next [-]

> The whole thing was just “we don’t like that this is happening, so we’re suing.”

Typical behavior from a big company with immense resources. They probably thought they would get a settlement or SerpAPI could not afford to fight. I assume they are pretty small, at least in comparison to Google (I've never heard of them).

Google has so much money that even a "loser pays" requirement on litigation probably would not disuade them.

akrymski |next |previous [-]

EU protects a database creator if there has been a qualitative or quantitative "substantial investment" in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the content, regardless of creative expression.

In USA copyright requires a minimum degree of original creativity in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the data.

I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. There's a rather large amount of effort involved in crawling and ranking the web - the PageRank itself should be copyrightable.

binarymax |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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.

wwind123 |root |parent [-]

Last time I looked into this (about a month ago), there's a lot of restrictions on the use of Gemini's search grounding results. There's not even an easy or approved way to de-mangle their returned URL's to get to the real URL of the search results. Has that changed recently?

binarymax |root |parent [-]

I haven't used it but they were silly about their programmatic search api in the same way. Can't use the results for anything other than showing them as-is on a results page.

jonatron |next |previous [-]

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_ |root |parent |next [-]

It's interesting to imagine how the world would be different, if internet advertising giants were partially liable for scams/malware that they facilitate.

asdefghyk |root |parent [-]

I recall a articale I read "somewhere" that reported the Facebook makes big profit (Billions) from scams. So they have no ( or no strong motive) motive to shut such scams down

An example is courtcase against Meta for using a Australians mining billionares likeness to promote a crypo investment scam.

https://www.afr.com/technology/dad-it-s-a-fraud-call-that-sp...

pnw |root |parent |next [-]

Your first assertion is obviously untrue. And fake celebrity endorsements pre-date the existence of the Internet, let alone Meta. There were lawsuits back in the 1800s on this topic. This is hardly a new problem unique to Meta.

bluGill |root |parent |previous [-]

I'm surprised legitimate companies don't pressure Facebook on this though. There are enough scams on Facebook that I now refuse to believe anything there, even though some of the things look useful and probably are not scams (and also are things I didn't know existed without an ad - thus filling one of the legitimate values of advertisements: informing me of things that would make my life better but I don't know exist).

cwmoore |root |parent |previous [-]

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dmix |next |previous [-]

DMCA needs to be reformed one day.

thisislife2 |next |previous [-]

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

rgrieselhuber |root |parent |next [-]

Always has been

lazide |root |parent |previous [-]

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

xbar |next |previous [-]

Hypocrisy-rich.

beloch |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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

BeetleB |root |parent |next [-]

> 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 |root |parent |next [-]

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

janalsncm |root |parent |next [-]

Sure, go ahead and ask the LLM who won the 2026 World Cup. Or nearby BBQ places open now.

Even assuming no hallucinations, an LLM can replace some use cases for search but not all.

Waterluvian |root |parent |next [-]

I tried both and it’s not even close which interface is better when it comes to answering a question. Google gives you stuff to sift through and interpret. AI just gives the answer.

Imagine you’re in the car or hands free or disabled and you just want the question answered.

https://ibb.co/whYmZWxs

https://ibb.co/JFkQbmJf

edoceo |root |parent |next |previous [-]

The LLMs I've tried don't do well with very new stuff. Like Zig for example, they tell me answers that were good for Zig 0.12 but we on 0.16 now. So I've got to feed them the latest docs, then do the AI dance.

ffsm8 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Fwiw, I've done those kinds of requests before and it did so successfully.

It did use Google to provide me with the answers though, sooo...

Forgeties79 |root |parent |previous [-]

Whether it's a good choice or not sadly doesn't change the current reality. People now use ChatGPT as a replacement for google.

BeetleB |root |parent |previous [-]

Really bad idea for a lot of search use cases.

worik |root |parent |previous [-]

> 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...

SoftTalker |root |parent [-]

I've been using DDG for at least 3 years. Very rarely use Google anymore, and when I do it is when DDG doesn't find much and in those cases Google usually isn't any better.

hommelix |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> - 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/

ffsm8 |root |parent [-]

Please don't send vibecoders to established open source projects . Your literally sabotaging them if you succeed.

layer8 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Google’s moat is that websites aren’t blocking their crawler.

bstsb |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> 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.

rebasedoctopus |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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

watwut |root |parent |previous [-]

> 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.

No way this is threat to google. For the same reason why the same hordes of engineers did not managed to compete with large companies up to now. And for the same reason they were not producing all that many novel small apps last 10 years.

This is winner takes all economy. Tokens or no tokes, this is not the econony of small competing companies. This is the world of big ones.

amanaplanacanal |root |parent [-]

If only there were laws about antitrust. Oh well.

super256 |next |previous [-]

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

john01dav |root |parent [-]

Gemini has been perfectly willing to write such things for me

paul7986 |next |previous [-]

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?

Imustaskforhelp |next |previous [-]

(IANAL) I think that the deeper thing from this lawsuit is that from my understanding, (inherently) Search engines are considered public indexes and the data (URL's,index) behind it is considered uncopyrighted and as such aren't protected by DMCA because DMCA only works for copyrighted contents and thus the dismissal of the lawsuit by the Judge.

Basically, search engines are publicly scrapable, though I do wonder as from a law point of view, that it must be within the murky waters as to what a search engine means in terms of seperating its search engine code/its recomendation engine and the public data much of which are intertwined with each other.

I believe that the argument that could be made is that the recommendation engine is the way it is because of all the data and its unseperable to really copyright the whole mechanism in all its glory.

Speaking of which, it seems that AI models feel really similar. Does this judge lawsuit show that AI model weights aren't copyrightable as well? If a search engine is built on public indexes then so are the AI models. I was just writing similar comment on another thread but it seems to be the case, definitely worth a blog article or thinking more about perhaps this judgement by this judge itself in general as well, I just have a vibe that this judgement has pretty far reaching consequences in its impact.

guardiangod |next |previous [-]

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

throwaway87543 |root |parent |next [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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 |root |parent |previous [-]

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

ChrisArchitect |next |previous [-]

Source:

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

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

raychis |previous [-]

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