When I was running a site, I had special rules in my firewall to look for things that said they were googlebot but which didn’t come from one of googles published public IPs.
Comment on Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down
ptz@dubvee.org 7 months agoI fear that as well. I use Searx-NG at home, so am expecting that to start dying a death of a thousand cuts soon.
Was thinking about standing up (or contributing to) either YaCY or Stract, but you made a good point about the bot allowances for the Googlebot et al crawler UAs. Wonder how frowned upon it would be to spoof the crawler UA in a self-hosted one?
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
ptz@dubvee.org 7 months ago
…yeah.
I had that thought after I replied when I realized that most of the reputable search crawlers will publish the IPs/ranges they use in addition to the UA. The disreputable ones (cough Bytedance cough Xiaomi cough) will just spoof Chrome on Windows 10.
That said, I may still continue looking into working with one of the actual search engines (vs meta search) and see how well that works.
Butterbee@beehaw.org 7 months ago
I’ve just started using Searxng… you expect it to die soon? Is it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?
ptz@dubvee.org 7 months ago
Basically, yeah.
Butterbee@beehaw.org 7 months ago
I hope there’s enough of a market for non-ai content that it doesn’t come to that. I think we already reached the pushback stage with image generation.