But wait, isn't Google already indexing the Fediverse? Public posts are available through http without auth... so I find it hard to understand the opposition from the admins described in this article. What am I missing?
Personally, I am unconvinced by the long-timer's argument. I believe that if you are against Fediverse crawlers ethically, you must be against web crawlers as well, and indeed I spent months without Google, DDG, or any other crawler-based search -- StackOverflow tags, Wikipedia and bookmarks were my friends. It was an enlightening experience, but I now hold the reverse position.