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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a contradiction between web scraping ToS and Internet neutrality. Allowing a site to be scraped (not different with crawling nowadays) only by Google but not by others violates that principle and concentrate de power within few companies.

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Yeah wtf? Everyone let's Google crawl their site but it's naughty for anyone else to do it... such bullshit!

Probably because scraping by search engines is a transaction that benefits both sides, as search engines bring traffic to the content's source.

"it's naughty for anyone else to do it" if that everyone are companies that will be using or monetizing that content without providing any kind of attribution or compensation to the source/creator.

Except now that Google shows the info directly in the search results.

Google isn't the only search engine.

Allowing a site to only be scraped/crawled by professionals (i.e. Google) ensures that those engaging such activity do so in a respectable manner.

It would be ideal to define the terms for scraping (similar to how API calls work) as opposed to the acceptable authors of scrapers.

I am not sure you can define those terms in a formal way. You can crawl the data in some way but use it for many different purposes that are difficult to control.

Fancy extension to robots.txt?

They are professionals now, but at the beginning it was not at all.

I would imagine even in the beginning that they, as developers, practiced good procedures while scouring the internet.

Given the difference in the size of the internet now and then, the backlash faced for poor practices may not be comparable.. so perhaps not.

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