Google lawsuit says data scraping company uses fake searches to steal web content

Reuters12-20 02:28
Google lawsuit says data scraping company uses fake searches to steal web content

By Blake Brittain

Dec 19 (Reuters) - Google on Friday sued a Texas company that "scrapes" data from online search results, alleging it uses hundreds of millions of fake Google search requests to access copyrighted material and "take it for free at an astonishing scale."

The lawsuit against SerpApi, filed in federal court in California, said the company bypassed Google's data protections to steal the content and sell it to third parties.

Reddit brought similar allegations against SerpApi and other data scrapers in October over their alleged theft of its material to help train artificial intelligence startup Perplexity's AI-based search engine. Perplexity is not mentioned in Google's lawsuit.

Spokespeople for SerpApi did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint.

"We devote significant resources to fighting this abuse and protecting websites’ content in our results," Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said in a statement. "When our technical security protections are circumvented in such a brazen way, as a last resort we take legal action to stop this behavior."

Google said its search results include licensed copyrighted content from other companies in services including its Knowledge Panels, Google Maps and Google Shopping. The lawsuit said such "high quality, content-rich" search results make it a "favorite target" for SerpApi and its customers.

Google requested an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order blocking SerpApi's scraping.

The case is Google LLC v. SerpApi LLC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 5:25-cv-10826.

For Google: David Kramer of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

For SerpApi: attorney information not yet available

Read more:

Reddit sues Perplexity for scraping data to train AI system

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington)

((blake.brittain@tr.com; +1 (202) 938-5713))

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