• tal@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    Robots.txt has been around for a long time, and all the major search engines will honor it. Not having a full index of the Web is the norm.

    That isn’t to say that the practice of signing agreements isn’t potentially a concern. Not sure that I like the idea of search engines paying sites money to degrade search results of competitors.

    • reddig33@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      What isn’t the norm is to serve one robots.txt to one company, and a different robots.txt to everyone else. Which is what Reddit is doing here.