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Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal (www.404media.co)

submitted 4 months ago by hotpot8toe@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

242 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

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[–] Eril@feddit.org 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] hotpot8toe@lemmy.world 0 points 4 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.world 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.org 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] starman@programming.dev 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

https://merj.com/blog/investigating-reddits-robots-txt-cloaking-strategy

Reddit is serving different file to google

[–] russjr08@bitforged.space 0 points 4 months ago

We believe in the open internet, but we do not believe in the misuse of public content.

That's real rich, coming from Reddit.

[–] capital@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.world 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.world 0 points 4 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.