Typical behavior from a big company with immense resources. They probably thought they would get a settlement or SerpAPI could not afford to fight. I assume they are pretty small, at least in comparison to Google (I've never heard of them).
Google has so much money that even a "loser pays" requirement on litigation probably would not disuade them.
https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/eu-forces-google-sh...
> Judge Mehta said in the 223-page ruling that Google must share some of its search data with “qualified competitors” to resolve its monopoly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-...
Google does supply search grounding with Gemini API calls, and that is handy, but not general enough.
In USA copyright requires a minimum degree of original creativity in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the data.
I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. There's a rather large amount of effort involved in crawling and ranking the web - the PageRank itself should be copyrightable.
I don't think a map is a good example. A picture is probably a better one. A map, by its very definition, is not a replica of any part of the original artifact. Not merely because a map is not the territory, but also because it's not even a direct, unaltered view of the thing. There is clearly some creativity required in putting together a map, since it requires you to decide what to include, what to leave out, what to exaggerate, what to distort, etc... as evidenced by maps of the same area looking vastly different.
By contrast, search engine results are stitchings of various pieces of the text on the page, verbatim. How much creativity that embidies is probably akin to that within a photo.
[0] - I believe a specific case was Nintendo vs Prima publishing, which was even involving a map of a fictitious construct.
An example is courtcase against Meta for using a Australians mining billionares likeness to promote a crypo investment scam.
https://www.afr.com/technology/dad-it-s-a-fraud-call-that-sp...
I'm kind of surprised that there haven't been criminal cases.
As soon as a dollar of profit is involved in a content moderation decision, a business should be fully liable for the decisions around content on their platform. If I report an ad to Facebook and Facebook decides to keep it they should be accepting legal responsibility for that ad.
You want to stop scams online, you make the platforms liable and then grant them the ability to recover the losses by going after the advertisers.
- 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
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.
Even assuming no hallucinations, an LLM can replace some use cases for search but not all.
Imagine you’re in the car or hands free or disabled and you just want the question answered.
Google's UX is terrible - but a search engine (a tool that can put you right into contact with the FAQ or forum where actual experts are discussing your problem) is always going to be powerful.
Such is the case for people trying to poison--ahem "influence" LLM results for "what is the best restaurant in $my_locale". You're playing a dangerous game.
Sure. But that's not what's happening here, yeah? Both examples are providing sources. Actually I'd say that the LLM is doing a better job at that. You click a button and see 9 URLs to 9 news sites.
I think for the "influence LLM results" fears, it would be ridiculous to argue about which multi-billion dollar American company can be trusted more not to manipulate you.
Does it show relevant snippets for each of the 9 URLs? If not, then it's as bad as Google's AI summary. It's not that rare that the reference disagrees with the LLM.
The value of the non-LLM search engine is that in the search results, you see the relevant snippet, and if you want more information, you know quickly which links to click.
Not saying there's no place for the LLM for many search engine use cases, but a proper search engine replacement it is not.
Prompt: Who won the 2026 World Cup?
Answer: Spain won the 2026 World Cup, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time in the final at MetLife Stadium on July 19. Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the 106th minute, coming on as a substitute in the 62nd minute. It’s Spain’s second World Cup title, having also won in 2010.
Prompt: Nearby BBQ places open now?
Answer: (a geolocation permission request prompt for the browser followed by) Right in [redacted] both [redacted] (4.6 stars, open until [redacted]) and [redacted] ([redacted]) are close and currently open.
A bit further out but highly rated: [redacted]
Seems like LLM does a good job on those questions…
It did use Google to provide me with the answers though, sooo...
Me, almost, too.
I have some friends using duckduckgo - not many and only until Google is the default again...
bear in mind we're on Hacker News. Google's market share is still above 90% - in almost any other market this would be a ridiculous monopoly.
Maybe look into contributing to existing alternatives like PostmarketOS.
https://nypost.com/2026/07/22/business/reddit-news-outlets-w...
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/google-search-publishers-...
No way this is threat to google. For the same reason why the same hordes of engineers did not managed to compete with large companies up to now. And for the same reason they were not producing all that many novel small apps last 10 years.
This is winner takes all economy. Tokens or no tokes, this is not the econony of small competing companies. This is the world of big ones.
Basically, search engines are publicly scrapable, though I do wonder as from a law point of view, that it must be within the murky waters as to what a search engine means in terms of seperating its search engine code/its recomendation engine and the public data much of which are intertwined with each other.
I believe that the argument that could be made is that the recommendation engine is the way it is because of all the data and its unseperable to really copyright the whole mechanism in all its glory.
Speaking of which, it seems that AI models feel really similar. Does this judge lawsuit show that AI model weights aren't copyrightable as well? If a search engine is built on public indexes then so are the AI models. I was just writing similar comment on another thread but it seems to be the case, definitely worth a blog article or thinking more about perhaps this judgement by this judge itself in general as well, I just have a vibe that this judgement has pretty far reaching consequences in its impact.
https://www.epceurope.eu/post/european-publishers-council-fi...
It behooves them to create systems that gets content creators paid as without content AI can not stay relevant. It also behooves entrepreneurs and technologists to create systems that solves this issue.
But only vaguely. Google uses its monopoly position in advertising to basically ensure that you allow them to scrape your site (or if not you personally, the majority of revenue driving sites). They have the benefit of being allowed by default.
They also then scrape again at the user level for users operating chrome.
They also conveniently ignore global blocks for their adsbots (you have to specifically name them to block them).
If you're not Google, you likely don't have this luxury.
My preference would be that governments force search indexes to be public. The exact mechanisms for this can be debated.