Google sued SerpApi for parsing—and replied that the company itself is considered a “first worldwide web scraper.”

SerpApi versus Google

What happened in a nutshell from Google: In December of last year, Google sued SerpApi, accusing it of copyright infringement and using “deceptive” methods to collect search results.

Accusations
1) Violation of the Copyright Act.
2) Collecting search engine output on “spectacular scales.”
3) Circumventing the SearchGuard protection mechanism that Google created to prevent automated parsing.

What SerpApi does and how they respond
1. Business model

- SerpApi gathers data from publicly available web pages, processes it, and delivers it to clients in a convenient format.

- The company claims this is essentially what Google does with the global internet, just on a smaller scale.

2. Copyright

- SerpApi disputes Google's claim of copyright over search results: “Google did not assert ownership” and the data they collect are publicly accessible, so they are not protected by copyright laws.

3. SearchGuard

- According to SerpApi, SearchGuard is intended solely to protect Google’s commercial interests, not licensed content. Therefore bypassing this mechanism cannot be considered a copyright violation.

Current status
SerpApi has filed a motion to dismiss, stating that Google is “the largest web scraper on the planet” and does the same thing, just at a larger scale. While the court considers arguments from both sides, the question of who truly has the right to control search results remains unresolved.