Recent decisions to discontinue access to social media APIs are having detrimental effects on Internet research and the field of computational social science as a whole. This lack of access to data has been dubbed the Post-API era of Internet research. Fortunately, popular search engines have the means to crawl, capture, and surface social media data on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) if provided the proper search query, and may provide a solution to this dilemma. In the present work we ask: does SERP provide a complete and unbiased sample of social media data? Is SERP a viable alternative to direct API-access? To answer these questions, we perform a comparative analysis between (Google) SERP results and nonsampled data from Reddit and Twitter/X. We find that SERP results are highly biased in favor of popular posts; against political, pornographic, and vulgar posts; are more positive in their sentiment; and have large topical gaps. Overall, we conclude that SERP is not a viable alternative to social media API access.

翻译：近期，社交媒体API访问权限的终止决策对互联网研究乃至整个计算社会科学领域产生了不利影响。这种数据访问的缺失被称为互联网研究的“后API时代”。幸运的是，主流搜索引擎能够通过恰当的搜索查询，在搜索结果页上抓取、捕获并呈现社交媒体数据，这或许能为这一困境提供解决方案。本研究提出的核心问题是：SERP能否提供完整且无偏的社交媒体数据样本？SERP是否可替代直接的API数据访问？为解答上述问题，我们对比分析了Google SERP结果与Reddit及Twitter/X的非抽样数据。研究发现，SERP结果显著偏向高热度帖子，存在对政治、色情及低俗内容的系统性压制，情感倾向更趋正面，且存在大量主题覆盖空白。总体而言，我们的结论是SERP无法有效替代社交媒体API数据访问。