Former Google engineer Tim Libert is releasing a search engine, webXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking—with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits.”
webXray California Privacy Audit | A Legal Minefield that Puts Users at Risk
Empirical analysis of Global Privacy Control compliance across popular websites accessed from California. Independent research by webXray.
Why Google’s New AI-Saturated Search Page Will Be A Disaster
Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honor belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has…
The Technical Feasibility of Divesting Google Chrome – Knight-Georgetown Institute
As the European Commission advances efforts under the Digital Markets Act to require Google to share its search data with competitors, lessons from historic antitrust remedies underscore how data access could be transformational in the AI-powered search market. While the Commission’s proposals represent a novel and comprehensive approach, key improvements to data scope and sharing frequency, privacy protections, and dispute resolution are needed. US courts and enforcers charged with implementing similar provisions should take note.
Dan Shipper 📧 on Twitter / X
The smallest technical decisions become humanity's biggest pivots:The same-origin policy—a well-intentioned browser security rule from the 1990s—accidentally created Facebook, Google, and every data monopoly since. It locks your data in silos—and you stayed where your stuff… pic.twitter.com/G87qsuPHxN— Dan Shipper 📧 (@danshipper) July 9, 2025
This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as an Alternative to Google in His Spare Time
"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.
Google is its own worst enemy
In its bid to push AI, it’s destroying its products and trying to kill the web too
Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed
As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.
Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed
As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.
Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse | The Walrus
As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
Google’s broken link to the web
With AI search results coming to the masses, the human-powered web recedes further into the background
Is Google about to destroy the web?
Google says adding more AI to its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites. One thing is clear: this era of online history is closing.
On Google declaring war on the Web
In Yesterday’s IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that “AI Overviews” have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the time). So they […]
Is Misinformation More Open? A Study of robots.txt Gatekeeping on the Web
Web scraping, the automated process of extracting information from websites, has long played a foundational role in the Internet ecosystem (Gray, 1995). It supports services such as search engine indexing, price comparison tools, and competitive intelligence. More recently, it has become a core component in the development of large-scale generative AI models. These Large Language Models (LLMs) require enormous volumes of training data, often in the terabyte range (Kaplan et al., 2020; Lehane, 2025), and the public web remains a low-cost, attractive source. Major model developers, including those behind OpenAI’s Chat-GPT (OpenAI, 2025), Google’s Bard (now known as Gemini) & Vertex AI (Romain, Danielle, 2023), and Anthropic’s Claude (Romain, Danielle, 2025), openly acknowledge the use of web scraping to construct their training corpora (Abdin et al., 2024; Brown et al., 2020; Chowdhery et al., 2023; Grattafiori et al., 2024; Team et al., 2024; Touvron et al., 2023).
Keynote: The Death of the Browser - Rachel-Lee Nabors, AgentQL
‘Plain and aggregated search results such as URLs, snippets, and factual index data, are publicly accessible facts and are not "works protected under the Copyright Act." Google cannot use copyright law to block scraping of uncopyrighted search result data.’ seroundtable.com/google-lawsuit-serpapi-dismis…
Google Lawsuit Against SerpApi Over Scraping Search Results Has Been Dismissed
www.seroundtable.com