Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by WesolyKubeczek 451 days ago
What do you think a search engine’s crawler bot is doing exactly? I could sure be wrong, but I have a hunch that “downloading content and paraing the HTML tags in a programmatic manner” describes it.
1 comments

Yes, but the difference is that the term "scraping" also targets things like automatically generating RSS feeds from HTML pages, which is not covered by robots.txt.
I thought robots.txt covered all automated, programmatic access by third parties where a bot slurps stuff and follows links, without splitting hairs about it.

But what do I know, the young whippersnappers will just word lawyer me to death, so I better shut up and go away.