The problem isn’t that the data is already public.
The problem is that the AI crawlers want to check on it every 5 minutes, even if you try to tell all crawlers that the file is updated daily, or that the file hasn’t been updated in a month.
AI crawlers don’t care about robots.txt or other helpful hints about what’s worth crawling or not, and hints on when it’s good time to crawl again.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
Yeah but there’s would be scrappers if the robots file just pointed to a dump file.
Then the scraper could just do a spot check a few dozen random page and check the dump is actually up to date and complete and then they’d know they don’t need to waste any time there and move on.
Dojan@pawb.social 8 hours ago
Given that they already ignore robots.txt I don’t think we can assume any sort of good manners on their part. These AI crawlers are like locusts, scouring and eating everything in their path,
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
Crawlers are expensive and annoying to run, not to mention unreliable and produce low quality data. If there really were a site dump available, I don’t see why it would make sense to crawl the website, except to spot check the dump is actually complete. This used to be standard and it came with open API access for all before the silicon valley royals put the screws on everyone
Dojan@pawb.social 47 minutes ago
I wish I was still capable of the same belief in the goodness of others.
mr_satan@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Dunno, I feel you’re giving way too much credit to these companies.
They have the resources. Why bother with a more proper solution when a single crawler solution works on all the sites they want?
Is there even standardization for providing site dumps? If not, every site could require a custom software solution to use the dump. And I can guarantee you no one will bother with implementing any dump checking logic.
If you have contrary examples I’d love to see some references or sources.
Zink@programming.dev 5 hours ago
My guess is that sociopathic “leaders” are burning their resources (funding and people) as fast as possible in the hopes that even a 1% advantage might be the thing that makes them the next billionaire rather than just another asshole nobody.
Spoiler for you bros: It will never be enough.