Access Google search results seamlessly with SerpApi’s over-the-top problem solving solutions

If you are on a lookout to automate your search engine optimization processes, industry experts are recommending you to use special tools and software. When working on non-complex matters, it is not an uphill task to employ the use of cutting-edge SEO tools. Conversely, if we are working with multiple websites and big data analytics, then we will need new methods to make your work easier. Under such circumstances, we should use Application Programming Interfaces (API). We can use API to communicate seamlessly among various applications. With API, you don’t have to do things manually. Application Programming Interface is all about letting computers do the work. Thus, it’s easier to update the workflow—which translates to more productivity and quick retrieval.

SerpApi is a real-time API to access Google search results. It solves the issues of having to rent proxies, solving captchas, and JSON parsing. SerpApi was founded in December 2017, and it is based in Austin, Texas.

In conversation with Julien Khaleghy, Founder and CEO of SerpApi

Q. Tell us about yourself and the motivation behind bringing SerpApi into existence.

I am originally from Paris, France, and came to live in Austin, TX, around four years go. At some point, I was working on developing iOS apps to detect things like dog breeds or types of food using machine learning. I thought for a while about the difficulty, because at that time, Apple didn’t have an official AI library for the iPhone. Furthermore, it was difficult to make machine learning work on iPhone as iPhones have limited RAM, and ML models are hungry for RAM. However, finally, the difficulty came from a completely different place. To construct ML models, you need a lot of raw data. In my case, pictures of dogs of different breeds or pictures of food of different types. One of the best ways to do this is to use Google Images to download the required images for the computer to “learn” on it. However, scrapping Google using proxies is, in fact, super difficult, and then making sense of the HTML and files mess retrieved is also super difficult. It ended up being a nightmare to extract relevant images, and I wish I had an API that I can pay for to extract that difficulty for me and just give the actual data. It’s from where SerpApi was born.

Q. What are the different use cases for SerpApi?

Different uses cases of SerpApi are:

• SEO (making sense of Google and other engines rankings, why some snippet are treated differently, extraction of the rich snippet)
• Local SEO (same as SEO but for Google Maps)
• ML and AI data for model creations (my initial use case!)
• Personal background check automation (Use by law enforcement for warrants, for example)
• Company background check automation (Use by banks and financial institution)
• News monitoring (for example, the FAO of the UN uses us to try to predict food shortage due to covid19 by analyzing Google News)
• Voice assistant (try to use search engine results for certain requests)
• Other big data applications (whatever you would want to use search engine results except in an automated way)

Q. Can clients use your API to update workflows to make them more productive and quicker?

We handle all proxies, captchas solving, browser emulations, and HTML inconsistencies for our customers. They get immaculate data in a predictable JSON format with blazing fast response time and can focus on their own app.

Q. Usually pricing is over the top for APIs. What are the factors that affect your pricing?

Our technology is very aggressive at using proxies, and we burn a lot of them to get just only one search. It cost us a large number of resources, and it’s reflected in our pricing. But it allows us to be super-fast and super consistent at close to 100% success rates in all scenarios.

Q. It is a big problem that sometimes your competitors’ ads might be displayed at the top of the search results, which might cause to redirect traffic from your site to theirs. How can we overcome this?

It’s indeed an annoyance as it is misleading and creating confusion for many of our customers. We’ve been exploring legal options with both the Google Ads team and our own Intellectual Property lawyers.

Q. Do you have any new services launching soon?

We’ve just launched a Walmart Search API https://serpapi.com/walmart-search-api. And we’ll be soon launching a HomeDepot Search API.

"Scrape Google and other search engines from our fast, easy, and complete API."