662
Reddit blocking all major search engines, except Google
(readwrite.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
662 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
72897 readers
1578 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm kind of curious to understand how they're blocking other search engines. I was under the impression that search engines just viewed the same pages we do to search through, and the only way to 'hide' things from them was to not have them publicly available. Is this something that other search engines could choose to circumvent if they decided to?
Thank you, I understand better now. So in theory, if one of the other search engines chose to not have their crawler identify itself, it would be more difficult for them to be blocked.
This is where you get into the whole webscraping debate you also have with LLM "datasets".
If you, as a website host, are detecting a ton of requests coming from a singular IP you can block said address. There are ways around that by making the requests from different IP addresses, but there are other ways to detect that too!
I'm not sure if Reddit would try to sue Microsoft or DDG if they started serving results anyway through such methods. I don't believe it is explicitly disallowed.
But if you were hoping to deal in any way with Reddit in the future I doubt a move like this would get you in their good graces.
All that is to say; I won't visit Reddit at all anymore now that their results won't even show up when I search for something. This is a terrible move and will likely fracture the internet even more as other websites may look to replicate this additional source of revenue.