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From my little understanding, we have a sort of agreement in place with an item called robot.txt that's more or less a hanshake with such scrapers. Of course, t
by johnnyanmac 2y ago
From my little understanding, we have a sort of agreement in place with an item called robot.txt that's more or less a hanshake with such scrapers. Of course, the issue is these scrapers are blatantly ignoring robots.txt
A license can help as well, but what's a license without enforcement? These companies are simply treating the courts as a cost to do business.
- CaptainFever 2y agoClose, robots.txt was originally for web crawlers, to reduce accidental denial-of-service attacks. It had nothing to do with the scraping (i.e. downloading content and parsing the HTML tags in a programmatic manner).
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoWhat do you think a search engine’s crawler bot is doing exactly? I could sure be wrong, but I have a hunch that “downloading content and paraing the HTML tags in a programmatic manner” describes it.
- CaptainFever 2y agoYes, but the difference is that the term "scraping" also targets things like automatically generating RSS feeds from HTML pages, which is not covered by robots.txt.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoI thought robots.txt covered all automated, programmatic access by third parties where a bot slurps stuff and follows links, without splitting hairs about it. But what do I know, the young whippersnappers will just word lawyer me to death, so I better shut up and go away.