  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.
