Comment on 13 Feet Ladder
andrew@radiation.party 1 year agoChecking ip ownership is a moving target more likely to result in outcomes these sites don’t want (accidentally blocking google bots and preventing results from appearing on google).
Checking useragent is cheap, easier, unlikely to break (for this purpose, anyway) and the percentage of folks who know how to bypass this check is relatively slim, with a pretty small financial impact.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s not necessarily a moving target when entire blocks can be associated with Google.
andrew@radiation.party 1 year ago
Unless they are permanently only using specific addresses or blocks and will never change that up, I’d consider it a moving target.
efstajas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Google literally has an official list of IP ranges for their crawlers, complete with an API that returns the current IP ranges that you can use to automate a check. Hardly a moving target, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter if you know exactly where the target is at all times.