10 comments

  • binarymax 48 minutes 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 21 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 51 minutes 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
      • thisislife2 56 minutes ago
        I am somewhat confused - does this mean we can all now legally scrape Google search results?
        • rgrieselhuber 42 minutes ago
          Always has been
          • lazide 30 minutes ago
            Legally and ‘they won’t do everything they can to stop you’ are not the same thing of course.
          • beloch 19 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 12 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

              • hommelix 1 minute 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/

                • rebasedoctopus 0 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
                  • BeetleB 5 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 1 minute ago
                      Let me tell you about this new little-known technology that's been gaining traction in the last few years...
                      • worik 2 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...

                  • xbar 1 hour ago
                    Hypocrisy-rich.
                    • super256 45 minutes ago
                      If only GPT wouldn't refuse my requests to write a crawler for $site. :(
                      • paul7986 28 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 1 hour ago
                          “You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly."
                          • throwaway87543 38 minutes 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
                            • Varelion 47 minutes ago
                              This sums up every single bit of AI "progress" since 2022.
                            • ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago
                              Source:

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

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

                              • raychis 30 minutes ago
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