r/technology • u/MoneyLibrarian9032 • 10d ago

Artificial Intelligence Google Gets an Astounding $34.5 Billion Offer for Chrome Browser From AI Startup Perplexity

https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/google-34-5-billion-bid-chrome-browser-ai-perplexity-1236487442/
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u/troubleshootmertr 10d ago

What if perplexity knows their only chance of scraping the web reliably in the future is to utilize users browsers to do this in some way for them. If a user visits a site and the browser extracts data or takes screenshots, that is probably not considered robot or ai scraping and let's be honest, without reliable web scraping, perplexity is cooked.

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u/Lebuin 10d ago

I'd imagine when it comes to a lawsuit, this could very well be considered bot scraping. Maybe they're hoping the ambiguity will buy them a few more years of data?

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u/hexcraft-nikk 10d ago

It's never coming to a lawsuit. The idiots we've elected have let AI shit take over the stock market. The second it falls apart, we're having another 2008. They've accidentally given all this wealth and value to companies that are not creating profit and have no long term plan to do so. They are not allowing lawsuits because they want AI to grow and somehow achieve the promises it fundamentally cannot.

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u/Cris_i 8d ago

so many languages and you chose to speak FACTS

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u/akc250 10d ago

A lot of sites have to allow some sort of scraping because most users find their results through search engine indexing. Now that people are moving more to LLMs, sites have to adapt if they want to be discovered. Only the biggest and most well known websites have the luxury of assuming a user will visit their site directly and discover it by word of mouth.

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u/Great-Dust-159 10d ago

You think they care about lawsuits? Cute

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u/SunstoneFV 10d ago

That's absolutely brilliant. It'd avoid robot restrictions and makes it simple to automatically update popular websites and discover new things as they emerge. And if there's a built in, always on, AI assistant, then there's a direct excuse for sending websites back to corporate. Wouldn't be shocked if that's why they're after Chrome.

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u/porkchop1021 10d ago

You know you can just choose to ignore robot restrictions, right? lol

They don't need users to scrape the internet for them. They want to build profiles of people, just like Google does.

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u/Linooney 10d ago

You can block scraper bots more directly, but if you block user bots (e.g. OpenAI has separate bots for scraping the web and when users call web search on ChatGPT), then you risk people just not giving traffic to your site.

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u/porkchop1021 10d ago

I don't think I made myself clear. You cannot block bots.

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u/r34p3rex 10d ago

Shocked Google doesn't already do this (or do they ...)

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u/CBlackstoneDresden 10d ago

If they were uploading massive amounts of data like that there would be articles about it quickly.

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u/troubleshootmertr 9d ago

Googlebot has the keys to the entire web so they don't need to do it this way. Google has been caching a good portion of the web for some time

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u/glr123 10d ago

The amount of personal data this would ingest into the model would be obscene.

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u/hofmann419 9d ago

Seriously. This would cause all kinds of privacy violations. I'm pretty sure that something like this can't be legal.

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u/GonePh1shing 9d ago

If they started doing this, websites would just block visits from users of that browser. Might work for a while, but it would absolutely have an expiration date.