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How is a robot used to scam a search engine? Are they stealing your results on a per-search basis?

• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Sometimes. Sometimes people try to build databases of pages about people, you know search for "Kennedy, Alice" and then get all the pages we have, then "Kennedy, Bob" ... "Kennedy, Charles" etc. People then try to offer "Find out about <name>!" types of services on their web sites. Or some wordpress theme will have a sql injection vulnerability and we'll get robots trying to find every site we know about that run that particular theme. There is lots of stuff you can do when you have a copy of the Internet, not all of it 'good.' Now we do sell API access to our index, but not for stuff like this.
  • Estragon 14y ago
    Thanks. Interesting.