%%excerpt%% Reddit has commenced its assault on search engines, blocking those that don’t have a commercial relationship with the company, like Google.
Instead of investing money in stop crawlers why do not make the data they are trying to crawl available to everyone for free so we can have a better world all together?
Data transfer isn’t free. It costs real money and energy to respond to queries. Don’t be surprised to see ~50% of all requests made to your server be from bots which you may have no interest in servicing outside of search engine indexers.
Hot take here.
I do believe in free information.
Instead of investing money in stop crawlers why do not make the data they are trying to crawl available to everyone for free so we can have a better world all together?
Data transfer isn’t free. It costs real money and energy to respond to queries. Don’t be surprised to see ~50% of all requests made to your server be from bots which you may have no interest in servicing outside of search engine indexers.
If you publish your data in a friendly manner bots would have no need to crawl your site.
Data that is more interesting and requested a lot could even be served over p2p.
This moderl would generate less cost that dealing with constant bot scrappers.
It is not a technical discussion. Or a discussion about associated cost. It’s a discussion about morals and economic models.