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Feed the bots

maurycyz.com

211–216 of 216 posts

Re: Feed the bots

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If bots get good enough to know what links they're scraping, chances are they'll also avoid scraping links they don't need to! The problem solves itself!

Maybe you're joking, but assuming you're not: This problem doesn't solve itself at all. If bots get good enough to know what links have garbage behind them, they'll stop scraping those links, and go back to scraping your actual content . Which is the thing we don't want.

That's sort of the point: almost nobody runs a site as large as Reddit. The average website has a relatively small handful of pages. Even a very active blog has few enough pages that it could be fully scraped in under a few minutes. Where scrapers get hung up is when they're processing links that add things like query parameters, or navigating through something like a git repository and clicking through every file in every commit. If a scraper has enough intelligence to look at what the link is, it _surely_ has enough intelligence to understand what it does and does not need to scrape.

Re: Feed the bots

#212
I suppose once you've lured them into reading a couple garbage pages you've successfully identified them as bots. You could then serve them garbage pages even for real urls as well just in case they ever got smart enough to try and back out of endless garbage. You could probably do a bunch of things that would only affect them specifically to increase their costs.

Re: Feed the bots

#213
post #207
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't seem to contain the meta-instruction. Example with GPT-5 Thinking: https://maurycyz.com/babble/With-Wand-and-Broomstick-Across-... "Short version: The page is a nonsense / glitchy faux-technical text dressed up like a lab manual." If we take a page from the site that doesn't hint but does have the in-band instruction: https://maurycyz.com/misc/ipv4/ "Short version: I tried to load https://maurycyz.com/misc…

I mean how does it know that though? How would you know if the set of possible texts is garbage without running them? Honestly feels like your saying LLMs solved the halting problem as programs which seems to be dishonest granted you could probably guess with high efficiency

Probably the same way a human knows. The gap is closing and I don't necessarily love it

Re: Feed the bots

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're joking, but assuming you're not: This problem doesn't solve itself at all. If bots get good enough to know what links have garbage behind them, they'll stop scraping those links, and go back to scraping your actual content . Which is the thing we don't want.

That's sort of the point: almost nobody runs a site as large as Reddit. The average website has a relatively small handful of pages. Even a very active blog has few enough pages that it could be fully scraped in under a few minutes. Where scrapers get hung up is when they're processing links that add things like query parameters, or navigating through something like a git repository and clicking through every file in…

Ah, I see what you mean now, thanks.

Re: Feed the bots

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to detect "garbageness" with an LLM drastically increases the scraper's per-page cost, even if they use a crappy local LLM. It becomes an economic arms race -- and generating garbage will likely always be much cheaper than detecting garbage.

That is literally what my post said, except the scraper has more leverage than is being admitted (it can learn which pages are real and “punish” the site by requesting them more). My point isn’t that I want that to happen, which is probably what downvotes assume, my point is this is not going to be the final stage of the war.

> That is literally what my post said

I don't follow that at all. The post of yours that I responded to suggested that the scrapers could "just add an LLM" to get around the protection offered by TFA; my post explained why that would probably be too costly to be effective. I didn't downvote your post, but mine has been upvoted a few times, suggesting that this is how most people have interpreted our two posts.

> it can learn which pages are real and “punish” the site by requesting them more

Scrapers have zero reason to waste their own resources doing this.

Re: Feed the bots

#216
Why not just use github pages for static blogs? It's free. No need to worry about extra bandwidth and other costs caused by crawlers.
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