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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

The basic social contract of the web fell apart long ago when almost everyone decided that Google was the only search engine worth serving and started aggressively blocking other crawlers.

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Add to that the removal of public APIs and things like RSS feeds. I would much rather use an API than scrape you, I will even pay a small fee, but if you don’t provide anything, then you’re getting scraped.

"Add to that the removal of public APIs and things like RSS feeds."

You mean like this public API

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/39421253.json

Or this RSS feed

https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml

Reddit recently started blocking anonymous GETs to RSS feeds.

And if you use your cookies they temp-block your account after x (like x every 30 minutes) times.

And I didn't even care that there was no content on the RSS feed, I just wanted the title / notification so I don't have to use ... (I can't put anything in here as there is no alternative that allows me to track everything).

Another one. This one has a rate limit.

  curl -si40A "" https://old.reddit.com/new.rss > 1.json

  sed 10q 1.json

   HTTP/1.1 200 OK
   content-length: 40582
   content-type: application/atom+xml; charset=UTF-8
   x-ua-compatible: IE=edge
   x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
   x-ratelimit-remaining: 93
   x-ratelimit-used: 3
   x-ratelimit-reset: 96
   x-reddit-pod-ip: 10.104.158.170:80
   x-reddit-internal-ratelimit-rls-type: ip-standard

In theory, APIs to retrieve public information suck because they are designed to be rate-limited or subject to quotas. Whereeas IME public-facing websites are much less likely to set rate limits and enforce quotas.

I prefer to use the public-facing website instead of "Web APIs" and convert HTML to SQLite which I prefer over non-LD JSON. If the public-facing website changes their HTML, I change the code in the filter. This is rare. It is very simple for me to do.

Are there services that have a copy of the Internet for a fee?

How did perplexity.ai crawl the internet for their AI?

I'm out of the loop on this. What has been happening? Do you get IP blocked? Rate limited?

You do and since the rise of Cloudflare, you need their approval to create your search engine

Unfortunately for them, AI is a double edged sword. AI can trivially scrape content from a screencap. And there are thousands of residential proxies that can’t be defeated even by companies like CF.

If you have residential proxies, you don't need AI to scrape via video, you have the HTML already.

Companies spend thousands of engineering hours building elaborate mechanisms to obfuscate JS, protect APIs, apps, trigger captchas, and hide content, all of it completely powerless against the current gen of AI tools. If a human can read it, a bot can.

Those same companies often invest in accessibility for vision-impaired users. I'm not sure you need a screen capture to scrape content when the site is designed to be navigable with a screen reader.

Surprisingly chatgpt is not accessible via screen reader, their captcha is purely image based.

Is OCR from 30 years ago now "AI"?

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