DuckDuckGo, Bing, Mojeek, and other search engines are not returning full Reddit results any more.

DuckDuckGo, Bing, Mojeek, and other search engines are not returning full Reddit results any more.

  • Eril@feddit.orgEnglish
    17·
    3 months ago

    robots.txt, I guess? Yes, you can just ignore it, but you shouldn’t, if you develop a responsible web scraper.

    • Hot Potato@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      18·
      3 months ago

      Also, rate limiting. A publicly accessible website doesn’t mean that it will allow scrapers to read millions of pages each week. They can easily identify and block scrapers because of the pattern of their activity. I don’t know if Reddit has rate-limiting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they implement one.

    • reddig33@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      3 months ago

      Doesn’t seem legal that a robots.txt could pick and choose who scrapes. Seems like legally it would have to be all or nothing. Here’s hoping one of the search engines ignores it and makes it a legal case.

      • Eril@feddit.orgEnglish
        13·
        3 months ago

        Actually currently it contains this:

        User-agent: *
Disallow: /

        Well, that actually is a blanket ban for everyone, so something else must be at play here.

      • capital@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        3 months ago

        You’d probably feel differently if it were your service. Should you be able to control who scrapes your sites or should that be all or nothing?

        For the record, I fucking hate what the internet is becoming. I naively believed that even if shit got cordoned off into the walled gardens that are mobile phone apps, the web would remain as open as it was. This is a terrible sign of things to come.

        • reddig33@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          No, I wouldn’t feel differently. In fact letting search engines scrape and point to your content is what leads people to your site. It’s free advertising. If you’re going to let one search engine in, you should let them all in. If you want to be public, be public. Otherwise put up a login firewall and go private.

          • capital@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            It’s not just search engines. Lots of people on Mastodon were using robots.txt to block ChatGPT (and any other LLM company they knew of) from scraping their sites/blogs.

            I disagree, to a point. I want to be able to control my services to the greatest extent possible, including picking who scrapes me.

            On the other hand, orgs as large as Google doing this poses a real threat to how the internet works right now which I hate.