[creato]

robots.txt was being enforced in court before google even existed, let alone before google got so huge:

> The robots.txt played a role in the 1999 legal case of eBay v. Bidder's Edge,[12] where eBay attempted to block a bot that did not comply with robots.txt, and in May 2000 a court ordered the company operating the bot to stop crawling eBay's servers using any automatic means, by legal injunction on the basis of trespassing.[13][14][12] Bidder's Edge appealed the ruling, but agreed in March 2001 to drop the appeal, pay an undisclosed amount to eBay, and stop accessing eBay's auction information.[15][16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

[dragonwriter]

Not only was eBay v. Bidder's Edge technically after Google existed, not before, more critically the slippery-slope interpretation of California trespass to chattels law the District Court relied on in it was considered and rejected by the California Supreme Court in Intel v. Hamidi (2003), and similar logic applied to other states trespass to chattels laws have been rejected by other courts since; eBay v. Bidder's Edge was an early aberration in the application of the law, not something that established or reflected a lasting norm.

[creato]

The point is, robots.txt was definitely a thing that people expected to be respected before and during google's early existence. This Kagi claim seems to be at least partially false:

> Google built its index by crawling the open web before robots.txt was a widespread norm, often over publishers’ objections.

[hattmall]

Perhaps it wasn't a widespread norm though. But I don't really see why that matters as much, is the the issue that sites with robots.txt today only allow Googlebot and not other search engines? Or is Google somehow benefitting from having two decade old content that is now blocked because of robots.txt that the website operators don't want indexed?

[ricardo81]

Agree. It was not standard in the late 90s or early 00s. Most sites were custom built and relied on the _webmaster_ knowing and understanding how robots.txt worked. I'd heard plenty of examples where people had inadvertently blocked crawlers from their site, not knowing the syntax correctly. CMS' probably helped in the widespread adoption e.g. wordpress

[embedding-shape]

> robots.txt was definitely a thing that people expected to be respected before and during google's early existence

As someone who was a web developer at that time, robots.txt wasn't a "widespread norm" by a large margin, even if some individuals "expected it to be respected". Google's use of robots.txt + Google's own growth made robots.txt a "widespread norm" but I don't think many people who were active in the web-dev space at that time, would agree that it was a widespread norm before Google.

[throw-the-towel]

Nitpick: Google incorporated in 1998, so, before the Bidder's Edge case.