I used Serp via API many moons ago. The most interesting part of the company imo is their legal defense of different plans:
Production - $150
15,000 searches / month
U.S. Legal Shield
ie. "Our U.S. Legal Shield protects your right to crawl and parse public search engine data under the First Amendment. We assume scraping and parsing liability for customers on most recurring plans unless your usage is illegal."
I imagine at least some portion of companies use them just for this liability shield.
Sounds a lot like the old guarantee paid SSL certificate providers used to offer; pretty words, but meaningless in practice. (IIRC, no one ever got a payout from any of them.)
"We assume scraping and parsing liabilities for both domestic and foreign companies unless your usage is otherwise illegal" seems like a big loophole in it.
Couldn't this be laid out as, We assume scraping and parsing liability unless it is ruled as being illegal, in which case your use would be illegal and our liability shield wouldn't help you?
I imagine at least some portion of companies use them just for this liability shield.
"We assume scraping and parsing liabilities for both domestic and foreign companies unless your usage is otherwise illegal" seems like a big loophole in it.
Like copyright infringement of Google's search results?