[fjabre]

Surely you must be joking. Alphabet is the largest web scraper in the world. They would soon go out of business if robots.txt was the only data they scraped.

It’s not a web crawler. They are all web scrapers. And Alphabet/Google sells this data and makes profits from it.

It is not like it is trying to hide the fact that it is king web scraper.

Google has gotten in trouble from various publishers for this before. It is no secret there is a double standard in big tech.

Again if you are going to arrest a web scraper, then arrest the king of all web scrapers first to make it fair.

Data wants to be free. If it is publicly accessible then it is fair game.

[NicoJuicy]

I'm probably not going to get a reply, but let's try:

Source ?

[fjabre]

You are stating that Google has never acted in bad faith and that robots.txt is the only thing that Google looks at when crawling/scraping the web.

You’re a smart guy. Surely you must know how ridiculous that sounds on the face of it.

It is common sense.

The sky is blue.

Source: Look up at the sky.

[NicoJuicy]

So, no source? Your response is unrelated to the statement at hand.

Think about it: Google has every advantage by respecting robots.txt and nothing to win by ignoring it.

Eg.

1) If a media company doesn't want to get crawled: add it in robots.txt

Then they realize their visitors drops and they'll remove it again.

Ergo: publishers sue. Because they want the advantages, but without the scraping. Which doesn't seem logical to me, since they currently give Google explicit permission to scrape content.

2) if they would sometimes leak personal documents protected by robots.txt they could have a lot of lawsuits on their hands.

Robots.txt is a simple method to not get blamed.

Ignoring robots.txt could literally be a core business liability from my POV.

---

So please, source outside of gut feeling, as requested before, would be greatly appreciated.

[fjabre]

My point is that they scrape the web for data because that is their core business.

Im not sure why robots.txt was even brought up.

So google respects this file? I say so what.

Im arguing that while Google has free reign to scrape whatever data it wants, we indie devs are subject to the cider house rules.

Sources can be found for just about any argument. So they are more or less useless.

There is nothing wrong with self evident truths or reasonable hypotheses. That is how the modern world was created.

A search engine that scrapes the web for data to make a good search engine. Who wouldve dreamed of it?

We are not privy to what happens behinds closed doors at Google. They only work for their shareholders. Not us or the public good.

Source that google does what it wants based on what it thinks the web should be. Google can change its mind on a whim https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-robots-txt-noinde...