Facebook's robots.txt
facebook.comAlso has a funny error 404 when you remove "s"
Uh oh... Something didn't work. > http://disqus.com/human.txt
What's "bmw" doing on the top of his head ?
Chrome user here. When I open it, the tab is automatically closed.
Tried to curl it, exact content, no 302 towards a "<script>window.close</script>",... Got anything?
You don't scrape Facebook, Facebook scrapes you!
In the US, you catch a cold. In Soviet Russia, cold catches you!
So what does it mean by facebook whitelisting a scraping service? Do they actively block scrapers?
I could be wrong but I believe that the the default is that spiders are blocked and only the "User-Agents" listed are allowed to scrape (but not the disallow pages).
You are correct.
Is there a way to replace this robots.txt with a null robots.txt? :)
You just ignore the robots.txt file, crawl slowly, and from distributed virtual machines.
Not that you should do that. Robots.txt is a nicety though, the client doesn't have to respect it, and the server doesn't have to allow your HTTP requests.
What is a User Agent: Yeti?
It's the crawler for Naver, a south Korean search engine.
Even Facebook's robots.txt has a hatred for my pseudo-anonymous browser settings. Facebook gives me this (for any page): "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."
robots.txt isn't enforced.
Maybe they should be. Gentleman's agreements do not apply to robots.
And how exactly do you propose verifying that the user agent purporting to be Googlebot or Firefox is actually who they are? They're inherently unenforceable.
robots.txt is basically a list of rules that lay out "This is how we'd like you to crawl us. We might stop serving you if you don't comply", rather than a hard-and-fast set of directives that specify how a webcrawler will be guaranteed to behave.
You can implement some strict enforcing in Apache using some crafty mod_rewrite stuff: http://andthatsjazz.org/defeat.html
User-agent is to easily spoofed, but we could check if the robots are indeed Google (whitelisted) and not some other crawler that just wants to scrape your content.
In the realm of mail servers we have something called SPF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
Just thinking out of the box here, but other than checking IP ranges: Maybe a hash being sent as a header inside the GET request by the crawler to verify if they are who they say they are.