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.
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?
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.
Notice how HN replies have no explanations for why Google now requires JS, after not requiring it for 27+ years and when other search engines today don't require it
I stopped using Google Web search as well after this point
NB. The autocomplete endpoint at clients1.google.com for example does not require Javascript, nor HTTPS
One could take the Google suggestions and search those strings in other search engines. Would the search results differ
Google Web search might be useful for finding "popular" results as these are the only results Google LLC management wants to show its ad targets, so-called "users", because funneling ad targets to the same sites ultimately creates larger audiences for advertising and more spend from advertisers
But if one is searching for "unpopular" results, e.g., performing "discovery", then using Google Web search is, IME, certainly not the best method of searching
IME, quitting Google leads to more creative search strategies; I have found stuff that I never would have discovered using Google Web search
NB. Google Web search requires Javascript. Scholar search, News search, etc. do not
Just going to copy the dead sibling comment because it says the truth:
"Allowing javascript can create security vulnerabilities (e.g. in the case of infected ads), and it is used for browser fingerprinting, so that users can be tracked and ad targeted across sites (especially if the information is sold, as part of a database, to third parties who combine it with other databases) even when they deny cookie and local storage permissions and aren't logged in to a google account and are using a vpn or proxy.
If you go to one of those "how unique is my browser" test websites, if you have javascript blocked, they have comparatively almost nothing to go off.
It also always loads slower and uses more data and ram than plain HTML, and unfortunately many people in rural areas still have shitty internet service and/or old hardware. And it's rubbish if you just want to browse the internet on something like an ereader or an old laptop.
Unless you specifically need features that aren't possible without it, it's a worse experience, and Google is choosing to make it mandatory for the whole site instead of just for the specific features that need it because it's good for their ad revenue. It's a means for Google to track and sell the data of users who are trying to opt out and preserve their privacy.
I haven't found a single other search engine that does this. I'm pretty sure even Bing doesn't (although they do their "log in for reward points" thing instead)."
Consider the level of data collection and behavioral surveillance enabled by the SearchGuard Javascript at issue in Google LLC v SerpApi LLC, as described here:
Google LLC may claim that this Javascript is an access control to protect material copyrighted by others
But the court in Google v SerpApi has found that to be false, with the possible exception of "Knowledge Panel" material. The court found that Google LLC is not authorized to protect the returned URLs in a SERP as copyrighted material
If the purpose of this Javascript is not access control for copyright protection then what is its purpose
Can the user control this Javascript. No, it's under the control of Google LLC
Can the user control how the data collected by GoogleLLC via SearchGuard or other Javascripts is used or where it may be sent. No
Many of these tactics, including Real-Time Bidding (see AdGguard blog post), as implemented by adtech companies such as Google, require Javascript
It is reasonable that a user might prefer to avoid running Javascript from adtech companies, such as Google LLC
Some of us have been searching the www since before Javascript existed
Using others' Javascript is a choice the user gets to make. Adtech commpany Javascript for web search should be optional. Costs may outweigh benefits. Depends on the user
But it shouldn't be necessary, nor is "can" any reasonable defense. The same goes for the BS about "open standard" web that is actually just Google-controlled and churning constantly to anticompetitively maintain their monopoly.
It's up to sites if they want to require an open standard and risk losing clients that haven't implemented it yet.
>churning constantly to anticompetitively maintain their monopoly.
Google open sources the implementations of these. Competing browsers like Brave and Edge are able to integrate this open source code to support them without themselves having to deal with constantly implementing new features.
Meanwhile Google actively blocks and attempts to pursue legal action against scrapers. Not to mention prohibiting it through TOS (getting your Google account revoked can be life-ruining for many people).
> 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.
SerpAPI is probably paid by most of the marketing industry to monitor their own position in Google results. And those guys seem to have unlimited money.
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.
> I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable.
I don't think a map is a good example. A picture is probably a better one. A map, by its very definition, is not a replica of any part of the original artifact. Not merely because a map is not the territory, but also because it's not even a direct, unaltered view of the thing. There is clearly some creativity required in putting together a map, since it requires you to decide what to include, what to leave out, what to exaggerate, what to distort, etc... as evidenced by maps of the same area looking vastly different.
By contrast, search engine results are stitchings of various pieces of the text on the page, verbatim. How much creativity that embidies is probably akin to that within a photo.
Where it gets tricky is that, at least in past US case law, 'maps are facts' and thus cannot be copyrighted as easily (this is part of why published maps often have intentional, hopefully subtle errors in them) [0]
[0] - I believe a specific case was Nintendo vs Prima publishing, which was even involving a map of a fictitious construct.
> this is part of why published maps often have intentional, hopefully subtle errors in them
Yes I remember reading a few years ago about the Royal Australian Navy trying to find Sand Island which I think was some tiny island marked on maps of part of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia - what they found was open ocean 1,100m deep, and concluded it was the map-maker's "mark".
The consensus was that Sandy Island was not a copyright “trap.” Some of the sightings may have been floating pumice from an undersea volcano, and the “confirmations” came from a chain of errors.
It's interesting to imagine how the world would be different, if internet advertising giants were partially liable for scams/malware that they facilitate.
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.
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).
Anyone making a Kickstarter knows that within days if not hours all your images, pictures, renderings will be harvested and dozens of "copycat" sites will be "selling" your product now, regardless of whether its a real thing or not yet, and they'll be advertising it on FB and IG.
I say those words in quotes - they have no intention of shipping you anything, just skimming low-hanging fruit from someone's ideas.
This is why Section 230 is fundamentally wrong. Because the core concept of it assumes reasonable behavior without monetary incentives. Which is great if you're legislating someone's personal forum about their hobby. But Section 230 applied to the ad industry is incredibly, incredibly broken, because advertising companies do not have any incentive to act in good faith.
As soon as a dollar of profit is involved in a content moderation decision, a business should be fully liable for the decisions around content on their platform. If I report an ad to Facebook and Facebook decides to keep it they should be accepting legal responsibility for that ad.
You want to stop scams online, you make the platforms liable and then grant them the ability to recover the losses by going after the advertisers.
Section 230 is fine but people keep misapplying it. It says Facebook didn't publish the ads, the ads publisher did. It doesn't say Facebook doesn't have to take them down. It doesn't say Facebook can't be ordered to reveal who the ad publisher is so they can go to jail.
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.
There's nothing obvious about it. Meta makes money on ads, period. Scams work and get clicks. Therefore, meta makes money on scams running rampant on their platform.
But after that you would get dialed in and stop seeing them.
Google's core mission is to figure out what you are going to buy before you buy it so they can have you click through them to make the purchase.
They generally have negative interest in serving scams/malware ads because people generally don't want to buy those things. On the same token though it's a very hard problem to 100% solve, and the people impacted are usually the lowest value users anyway.
But when they turn off ad-block, to "see what it's like", they are not getting an accurate view. It's usually all crypto and other scammy/vices type ads.
Go look at your mom's browser. Her Google ads are going to be clothes, tissues, and cookware.
Nigerian prince scams cannot outbid Kleenex without breaking the economics of the scam. But they can get loaded when Kleenex no-bids because they don't know who the viewer is.
Trust me, ad-tech is far far beyond 2004 when ad block showed up.
(I'll add that of course there are other less legitimate ad networks, and I'm not counting "snake oil" products, which are essentially scams but customers still swear by them)
Presumably they would only have to show they're doing some simple due diligence. At minimum KYC and a reporting process that works. Neither of which Google et el do currently.
Imagine how world would be different if the actual scammers and malware creators would be prosecuted and not insteead demanded that internet giants play a privatized police force.
Aren't the giants closer to the mob than a police force? I suppose those things are not terribly different in practice, but Google, Facebook, et al make money from leaving the scams on their ad networks.
Either way works - I'd still prefer the scammers to be liable and persecuted for their scamming than demanding that platforms enact censorship and policeing control.
3. Serves the scam to the consumer, ensuring they see it
4. Takes a cut of the action when the scam is successful
5. Tells the scammer how to optimize their campaign
6. Continues working with scammers after they're reported
The scammer has a fairly small part in the overall operation. The platform is doing almost all of the actual work perpetrating the scam. They're not remotely innocent here.
Normally, if there is sufficient evidence, both the mob boss and the ground level gangster are liable and criminally responsible for their crimes. You are free to disagree, but I don't see any reason why big tech companies should be completely immune from any and all responsibility for facilitating and taking a cut of the criminal activity taken on their territory.
You are also free to call it censorship, but I am not aware of any jurisdiction where fraud is considered protected speech, so as far as I'm concerned, censor away baby.
Same with land registry UK, it takes me several tries even though I know I should be looking for the .gov version. Last time I only realised I got the ad version because it asked me to pay for something that's free on the gov version.
The irony is that Google's success was built on crawling and indexing the open web. I understand wanting to protect your product, but once you remove affordable APIs and then object to third parties filling that gap, you're creating demand for the very behavior you're trying to discourage
No, but it should only last 10 years or so. Copyright in general is good as it provides economic incentive to produce new creative works. But copyright lasting or exceeding the length of people's lifetimes has done more harm than good to society. By that time, you have long since passed over from incentivizing creators, into enabling rent-seeking corporations.
I think this case is clearly directed at OpenAI and Anthropic, how do you think those guys get google results when the model searches for things for live data....
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.
- 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
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.
Claude Sonnet 5 Medium more or less on the timestamp of the comment:
Prompt: Who won the 2026 World Cup?
Answer: Spain won the 2026 World Cup, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time in the final at MetLife Stadium on July 19. Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the 106th minute, coming on as a substitute in the 62nd minute. It’s Spain’s second World Cup title, having also won in 2010.
Prompt: Nearby BBQ places open now?
Answer: (a geolocation permission request prompt for the browser followed by) Right in [redacted] both [redacted] (4.6 stars, open until [redacted]) and [redacted] ([redacted]) are close and currently open.
A bit further out but highly rated: [redacted]
Seems like LLM does a good job on those questions…
On a personal level if I used to do 100 google searches on a daily basis, now I would be doing only 10. And it is the case with everyone in the tech ecosystem at least. So it would be fair to assume that there share has reduced.
On the LLM side as well, I have not seen much people using Gemini vs the market share of Claude / Open AI.
The assumption of the long tail still using Gemini because it is bundled might be correct, but I am not even sure if that is something that Google will be happy with.
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.
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.
Let me revise that super abbreviated prognostication to hint at what I was really trying to say.
I think a lot of people are going to start to look at replacing Android and iOS, and some of these will be decently funded teams. Some perhaps not even based in the US.
Attacking the phone market used to be unthinkable. Not even Facebook could pull it off.
But now? I think it's open season again.
Even if the problems to solve are truly deeper than they appear, LLMs are going to give people so much energy to look past the difficulty.
Or offer good value for money. I subscribe to Kagi and a few online newspapers. If you let me pay $10 every month for access to every online newspaper I'd take that offer.
But you can't be shit and also charge a subscription. There has to be good stuff behind the subscription.
> 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.
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
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
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.
And they do specifically also scrape sites anonymously, ostensibly to ensure you don't serve different content to GoogleBot than users (though this is in my experience unreliable at best, and that's even before we get to the "do we trust that that's the only scope?").
The question I have that no one has really answered is...what kind of crawling have the current frontier labs done historically and what are they continuing to do now for training? Inference can follow rules easily, but the training is a big black box that mostly gets headlines for books getting slashed but that's not the only source of data is it?
(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.
Yes, it will take legal action in Europe and or when the U.S. switches back with more democrats in power to force them to start paying their fair share.
It behooves them to create systems that gets content creators paid as without content AI can not stay relevant. It also behooves entrepreneurs and technologists to create systems that solves this issue.