I'm always surprised by the level of ignorance, but I've seen more than one startup burn because the founders didn't understand which taxes were due and, thus, failed to account for them in their pricing.
> I'm always surprised by the level of ignorance
Such as the ignorance displayed in your comment?
It's not illegal. Google can sue them and bury them in court fees and potentially win a civil suit, but it sure as hell isn't illegal.
However, 300k requests per day surely is enough that this could be considered a sort of denial of service attack and violate fair use.
If Google wanted to, they would scale down their servers for a day, wait for this traffic peak to hit, document how it made the service unavailable to others, and now you have a valid offense to sue for.
illegal means violate criminal code.
> now you have a valid offense to sue for
That's civil, not criminal.
It's pedantic, but words matter.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
Yes. That's also what I said above when I said "Google can sue them". It's not illegal is my entire point. You can sue anyone, for any reason, at any time, and even win. That doesn't make something illegal.
If Google sends them a C&D, and expressly forbids them from doing this activity, and implements technical measures to prevent them from doing so, and they continue doing so then they may start approaching the area of illegal (Craigslist v. 3Taps would agree, hiQ v. LinkedIn would disagree).
300k requests / day is a little over 3 per second. That's not much.
I do think that if they ever get traction they'll have a lot of problems - there's a reason GDS access to flight availability is slow, expensive, and difficult to implement well. Scraping definitely won't scale.
The article mentions that they are using rotating residential proxies.
... by externalizing the costs to a third party.
In general, I'm really surprised that they published this article. It's like they described exactly the data that somebody working on preventing scraping would need to block this traffic, in totally unnecessary level of detail. (E.g. telling exactly which ASN this traffic would be arriving from, describing the very specific timing of their traffic spikes, the kind of multi-city searches that probably see almost no organic traffic).
I just don't get it. It's like they're intentionally trying to get blocked so that they can write a follow-up "how Google blocked our bootstrapped business" blog post.