- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Parts of the Internet now only searchable on specific sites now? What next - charging a monthly subscription to use Google?
This needs to be regulated before the Internet becomes like streaming TV.
Robots.txt has been around for a long time, and all the major search engines will honor it. Not having a full index of the Web is the norm.
That isn’t to say that the practice of signing agreements isn’t potentially a concern. Not sure that I like the idea of search engines paying sites money to degrade search results of competitors.
Is Google really permitted to prevent any other search engine from looking at Reddit?
I guess Reddit is permitted to only let Google index it
Are they though?
I don’t know of any law that says that they can’t.
I also don’t know if a law that says search engines have to honor a robots.txt file. I guess we will see what happens if Bing or some other service decides to ignore it.
How can they do that, logistically?
Like I realize there’s a flag they can raise that asks not to be indexed but that’s not legally binding.
I guess they can make it hard to index by scraping by rate limiting or requiring login to view content etc and only provide Google the api to bypass the restrictions
There’s probably a lot of ways to do it
just begin with site:reddit.com test for brave search and it still works
did you set time limit to last week? old posts are still indexed. just tried “site:reddit.com df:w” on DDG and no hits