Hacker News Reader

That's pretty rich coming from a company that scrapes websites for a living.

Are Google's terms legally binding if you are just searching? I don't recall ever agreeing to them in that case.

> is the ToS legally binding if you are just searching

Based on the LinkedIn case my guess is no, because it could be considered "generally public". But that ruling is highly suspect and likely to go to the supreme court, imo.

The onus is on them to prove that I agreed to some ToS.

If it's publicly accessible, it's pretty much a public space, thus Google ToS is BS. It's the equivalent of walking by the Google office and taking a photo of the building, IMO. This wouldn't hold up in court.

Additionally in a court decision from last year, accessing public data is legal. https://parsers.me/us-court-fully-legalized-website-scraping...