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surprised no-one has suggested that this is to improve performance. this place can be very slow sometimes, and blocking robots can reduce load.

• keltex 17y ago
  That's not a legitimate reason to ban google. You can always (using google's webmaster tools) throttle their indexing. Or you can use search-engine specific lines in robots.txt (Bing anyone?) to ban misbehaving bots. The only reason to do this is if you don't want your site indexed by google. Which I really can't think of a legitimate reason to do so.
  • andrewcooke 17y ago
    true, but it's a busy time for yc. maybe this was just a stop-gap measure? when did it start?
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  • jonknee 17y ago
    ... And you can speed the site up. There's no reason HN has to be so slow.
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