I can see why spez is upset about scrappers and search engines - image a company profiting from people creating lots of data, just hoarding it and using it for free, and not paying those people a cent, preposterous, right? :)
Microsoft and Reddit Are Fighting About Why Bing’s Crawler Is Blocked on Reddit
Submitted 4 months ago by theangriestbird@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org
Comments
doctortofu@reddthat.com 4 months ago
Ilandar@aussie.zone 4 months ago
“This was Microsoft’s choice, not ours,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told me in an email. “We are and have been open to agreements with companies who are open about their intentions and commit to treat us and our users fairly. If Bing or others want access within our policies, without training, without summarization, and without selling it to others, we are and have always been open to that. If they want to build a business selling Reddit data or using the data for training, we could be open to that, but it’s a commercial conversation.”
Mojeek, the search engine that initially told me that Reddit was blocking all search engines but Google, and which was unable to get in touch with Reddit at the time, told me Reddit got in touch after that story was published. Mojeek said it was unable to share any details about the deal because of an NDA, but confirmed that Reddit wanted to get paid for letting Mojeek crawl the site, even though Mojeek does not have any AI products.
This doesn’t add up and it makes me wonder what else Google and reddit agreed upon. This situation benefits no one except Google, as far as I can tell. If reddit wants to milk search engines, and Microsoft is willing and able to pay (which I assume they are), there is no reason for the deal to not go ahead like it did with Google. Kinda makes my brain start going down the conspiracy path, but then again it’s hardly unbelievable that Google would pursue anti-competitive business strategies, particularly when it comes to generative AI.
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 4 months ago
A search engine can’t pay a website for having the honor of bringing them visits and ad views.
Fuck reddit, get delisted, no problem.
Weird that google is ignoring their robots.txt though.
Even if they pay them for being able to say that glue is perfect on pizza, having
User-agent: * Disallow: /
should block googlebot too. That means google programmed an exception on googlebot to ignore robots.txt on that domain and that shouldn’t be done. What’s the purpose of that file then?
Because robots.txt is just based on honor, should be
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: User-agent: * Disallow: /
MrSoup@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
I doubt Google respects any robots.txt
DaGeek247@fedia.io 4 months ago
My robots.txt has been respected by every bot that visited it in the past three months. I know this because i wrote a page that IP bans anything that visits it, and l also put it as a not allowed spot in the robots.txt file.
I've only gotten like, 20 visits in the past three months though, so, very small sample size.
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 4 months ago
for common people they respect and even warn a webmaster if they submit a sitemap that has paths included in robots.txt
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 4 months ago
[deleted]Zoop@beehaw.org 4 months ago
User-Agent: bender
Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass
Ha!
tal@lemmy.today 4 months ago
I guessed in a previous comment that given their new partnership, Reddit is probably feeding their comment database to Google directly, which reduces load for both of then and permits Google to have real-time updates of the whole kit-and-kaboodle rather than polling individual pages.
jarfil@beehaw.org 4 months ago
Google is paying for the use of Reddit’s API, not for scraping the site.
That’s the new Reddit’s business model: want “their” (users’) content, then pay for API access.
ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
I hope all big corporate SEO trash follows suite, once they’ve all filtered themselves out for profit we can hopefully get some semblance of an unshittified search experience.
tal@lemmy.today 4 months ago
The reason that robots.txt generally worked was because nobody was trying to really leverage it against bot operators. I’m not sure that this might not just kill robots.txt. Historically, search engines wanted to index stuff and websites eanted to be indexed. This no longer holds if things like the Google-Reddit partnership become common.
Reddit can also try to detect and block crawlers; robots.txt isn’t the only tool in their toolbox.
Microsoft, unlike most companies, does actually have a technical counter that Reddit probably cannot stop, if it comes to that and Microsoft wants to do a “hostile index” of Reddit.
Microsoft’s browser, Edge, is used by a bunch of people, and Microsoft can probably rig it up to send content of Reddit pages requested by their browser’s users sufficient to build their index. Reddit can’t stop that without blocking Edge users. I expect that that’d probably be exploring a lot of unexplored legal territory under the laws of many countries. It also wouldn’t be as good as Google’s (I assume real-time) access to the comments, but they’d get to them.
Browsers do report the host-referrer, which would permit Reddit to detect that a given user has arrived from Bing and block them:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
In HTTP, “Referer” (a misspelling of “Referrer”[1]) is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the web page (i.e., the URI or IRI), from which the resource has been requested. By checking the referrer, the server providing the new web page can see where the request originated.
In the most common situation, this means that when a user clicks a hyperlink in a web browser, causing the browser to send a request to the server holding the destination web page, the request may include the Referer field, which indicates the last page the user was on (the one where they clicked the link).
Web sites and web servers log the content of the received Referer field to identify the web page from which the user followed a link, for promotional or statistical purposes.[2] This entails a loss of privacy for the user and may introduce a security risk.[3] To mitigate security risks, browsers have been steadily reducing the amount of information sent in Referer. As of March 2021, by default Chrome,[4] Chromium-based Edge, Firefox,[5] Safari[6] default to sending only the origin in cross-origin requests, stripping out everything but the domain name.
Reddit could block browsers with a host-referrer off bing.com, killing the ability of Bing to link to them. I don’t know if there’s a way for a linking site to ask a browser to not give or forge the host-referrer. For Edge users – not all Bing users – Microsoft could modify the browser to do so, forcing Reddit to decide whether to block all Edge users or not.
i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
It is possible to remove the referer header:
AceSLS@ani.social 4 months ago
They can try to block crawlers all they want
They will not succeed without restricting access to Reddit to an unusable degree, since crawlers can be coded to imitate real users close enough. Combine that with enough proxies and they can’t do jack shit
Also you could get arround the Referer header quite easily via redirects (unless Reddit went ahead and used a Whitelist for those, which again would be a very stupid decision) and some more methods
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Man, wouldn’t that be nice. There’s too much money in appearing on searches for me to ever expect that to happen, though.
TehPers@beehaw.org 4 months ago
Joke’s on Reddit. I’ve been blocking their results in the search engine I use for months!
I wonder if this will end up being pursued as an antitrust case. If anything, it’ll reduce traffic to Reddit from non-Google users, so hopefully that kills them off just a little faster.
AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 4 months ago
Come on. Be realistic. Chrome has 70% browser market share and people are already used to tacking “Reddit” onto the end of their search queries to find useful information. If anything this will have no effect besides steering people towards Google.
TehPers@beehaw.org 4 months ago
People on Chrome adding Reddit to their Google searches already use Google. People not using Google who don’t search “Reddit” are going to see fewer Reddit results.
No, this won’t kill Reddit, but it certainly isn’t helping them get more traffic.
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 4 months ago
I know the author meant “scrape”, but sometimes it really does feel like AI is just scrapping the old internet for parts.
cybermass@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Yeah, aren’t like over half of reddit comments/posts by bots these days?
originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 4 months ago
yep, and the longer that happens the less value to the dataset. its becoming aged.