Marcus Mendes: In its statement issued earlier this week to the German Press Agency, Apple said the following:“Intense lobbying efforts in Germany, Italy and other countries in Europe may force us to withdraw this feature to the detriment of European consumers. (…) We will continue to urge the relevant authorities in Germany, Italy and across […]

John Ozbay (Hacker News): In my mind, “Apple” as a brand used to be synonymous with “attention to detail” but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.[…]If you are privacy conscious like me, and don’t give the Reminders app permission to access your […]

Thomas Claburn: Microsoft Excel for the past week has been hanging or crashing on iOS and iPadOS devices, to customers’ great annoyance.The problems appear to have begun following the release of Excel version 2.102.1 for iOS and iPadOS on October 13, 2025. The release added support for Apple’s Liquid Glass design, which debuted with the […]

At the bottom of their “Use Cases” page, SerpApi lists the following companies and organizations as customers (“They trust us. You are in good company. Join them.”):

• Airbnb
• Nvidia
• Meta
• Shopify
• Perplexity
• KPMG
• Ahrefs
• Grubhub
• Samsung
• AI21labs
• United Nations (!)
• Thomson Reuters
• BrightLocal
• Experian

From an August 21, 2025 report in The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, alas), however:

OpenAI also isn’t the only Google rival to use SerpApi data. SerpApi’s website previously listed Apple as a customer. In addition to partnering with Google on search, the iPhone maker develops technology to power searches in Safari — a lucrative deal that the judge overseeing the DOJ case could also nix.

Was Apple removed from the list because they’re no longer (or never were?) a customer, or because they remain a customer but don’t want to be listed?

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

Eight years ago, SerpApi, a start-up in Austin, Texas, dived headlong into the byzantine world of using robots to “scrape” Google’s search algorithms, so it could collect information to help customers appear higher in search results.

Then OpenAI’s ChatGPT came along, kicking off an artificial intelligence revolution. As more tech companies began building A.I. chatbots to keep up, they needed large amounts of data to train their A.I. models — data that SerpApi had already gathered.

Practically overnight, a class of companies like SerpApi — known as “data scrapers” — found a new business selling data scraped from Google to companies looking to train their A.I. chatbots.

On Wednesday, the internet message board Reddit decided to fight the data scrapers. It filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York claiming that four companies had illegally stolen its data by scraping Google search results in which Reddit content appeared.

I’d never heard of — or at least never noticed — SerpApi until a few weeks ago, when a good friend asked me if I’d ever looked into them. The entire premise of their business is crazy. SerpApi prints the crime right on the tin, describing their service as a “Google Search API” and “Scrape Google and other search engines from our fast, easy, and complete API.” What makes this so crazy is that Google doesn’t offer a search API. SerpApi is offering the Google search API that Google itself doesn’t offer, and charging companies money for it. Everyone, upon hearing the premise and nature of SerpApi, asks the same question: How is this legal? The answer is, it probably isn’t. But right on SerpApi’s home page they claim to offer customers a “U.S. Legal Shield”:

The crawling and parsing of public data is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. We value freedom of speech tremendously. We assume scraping and parsing liabilities for both domestic and foreign companies unless your usage is otherwise illegal. (Including but are not limited to: acts of cyber criminality, terrorism, pedopornography, denial of service attacks, and war crimes.)

My only surprise here is that it’s Reddit taking SerpApi (along with two similar companies, one from Lithuania and the other from Russia — the former Soviet states respect intellectual property about as much as China does) to court, not Google. Why Google hasn’t sued them yet, I don’t understand. Anyway, back to Isaac’s report for the Times:

Perplexity was one of those buyers, according to Reddit’s lawsuit. Perplexity had scraped Reddit data in the past without payment but agreed to stop after Reddit sent it a cease-and-desist order. Even so, citations to Reddit data in Perplexity search results jumped “fortyfold,” the lawsuit said. Reddit has spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-scraping systems over several years.

“Perplexity’s business model is effectively to take Reddit’s content from Google search results,” then feed it into an A.I. model and “call it a new product,” the lawsuit said.

Reddit said it had set a trap for Perplexity by creating a “test post” on its site that could “only be crawled by Google’s search engine and was not otherwise accessible anywhere on the internet.” Within hours, Perplexity search results had surfaced the content of that test post, the lawsuit said.

Google, which is not a plaintiff in Reddit’s lawsuit, has tried and failed to stop SerpApi and other data scrapers, according to the lawsuit and previous reporting from The Information.

The people leading Perplexity aren’t just shifty — they’re stupid. That whole company just reeks of being a scam.

See also: Reddit’s PDF of their lawsuit, Reddit v. SerpApi.