Google sues SerpApi over scraping and reselling Search data

Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results.

The allegations: Google said SerpApi:

• Circumvented Google’s security measures and industry-standard crawling controls.
• Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed.
• Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to scrape content at scale.
• Took licensed content from Search features, including images and real-time data, and resold it for profit.

What Google is saying. “Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override [crawling] directives and give sites no choice at all,” Google wrote, calling the alleged scraping “brazen” and “unlawful.” Google said SerpApi’s activity “increased dramatically over the past year.”

Catch up quick. Google’s lawsuit similar legal action taken by Reddit, which named SerpApi,…