Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ric2b 1052 days ago
> I should be able to allow or disallow any type of web crawler/scraper i want.

You're certainly allowed to try, but I don't see why indexers should be mandated to collaborate with you. They serve their users, not you.

1 comments

Will their users appreciate that they disregard the intent of the authors of what they index?

I mean, "allow" or "regulate" don't _really_ apply here - there was never any enforcement regime around robots.txt, just a convention based on the general expectation that you don't claim ownership of whatever passes your line of sight.