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Comment by technerder | Hacker News Reader

>Mullvad Leta uses the Google Search API as a proxy search engine. Searches are cached each time, and the cached results are shared by every user of the

I was under the impression that the search API terms didn't allow people to cache the results/data, although I might be thinking of another one of their services.

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> Google Search API

This does NOT exist. They are misusing/reverse-engineering Google Search.

Edit: As child comments say, there is a version of a Search API available by paying. This is not the same as what Mullvad is providing and is not meant to provide a competitive service to Google.

We used this for a project: https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/ before we moved to Elastic Search.

It has a REST API (and can be used to query the internet also, though our use case required us to restrict the results of one particular domain). I believe this is the closest thing to a Google Search API.

So they seem to have a special agreement.

1.3 Your Obligations. You shall receive a Query from the End User and shall forward that Query to Google. You may not in any way frame, cache or modify the Results produced by Google, except as otherwise agreed to between You and Google.

https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/171430...

I suppose a they may have written a service to query Google and there may be a CDN caching responses from that, which can be argued as not being a permanent datastore which I believe Google may be more likely have a problem with. It could also depend on the fact whether Google is willing to send a cease and desist over this.

However, I am no lawyer, so take it with a grain of salt.

It absolutely does exist, as can be seen from companies like Startpage and Kagi using that paid API.

But yes, it seems hard to believe that the terms of service for a paid API would allow for caching of results. What this sounds like is Mullvad betting that they can just use their VPN IPs for scraping search results and not be blocked.

Edit: the Leta FAQ claims they're paying for API access, seems unlikely they'd lie about that.

They list search in their public api

https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/blob/288aa7fb71c9b6...

That’s the Retail Search API, as seen in your URL.

https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/blob/288aa7fb71c9b6...

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