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Disclaimer: I work on a search engine (findx). I try not to put competitors in a bad light.
Question: Should a web crawler always reveal its true name?
Background: While crawling the web I've found some situations where using a fake user-agent might help. First example is a web site that checks the user-agent in the http-request and returns a "your browser is not supported" - even for robots.txt. Another example is a site that had an explicit whitelist in robots.txt. Strangely, 'curl' was whitelisted but 'wget' was not. I hesitate in using a fake user-agent, e.g. googlebot because it isn't clear what the clueless webmasters' intentions are. It appears that some websites are misconfigured or so google-optimized that other/new search engines may have to resort to faking user-agent.
I'm also puzzled by Qwant because they claim to have their own search index but my personal website (which is clearly indexed when I search in qwant) has never been crawled by a user-agent resembling anything that could lead to qwant. Apparently they don't reveal what their user-agent is: https://blog.qwant.com/qwant-fr/. And there has been some discussion about it: https://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/4743502.htm
This is different from search engines that don't have their own index (eg. DuckDuckGo uses results from Yahoo! and yandex. Startpage uses Google, etc.)
So what do you Soylentils say, is faking the user-agent in webcrawls necessary? Acceptable? A necessary evil?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 05 2016, @03:53PM
Mixed feelings about Archive.org. I once was very happy to have this behavior.
Getty Images once threatened to sue our micro-company over images we had on a website. We had purchased these from a smaller site that Getty bought; after Getty bought them, they apparently discarded the sales records. They were unimpressed by our physical receipts, because these didn't map directly to the image numbers.
We could fight them in court, or we could pay them off for only $x thousand, a figure they set to be less than initial legal costs would have been. It's sort of like the ransomware out there, only they abuse the legal system instead of cryptography. Their timing was also great, just before Christmas, when they bloody well knew that most people didn't want to deal with crap.
Anyhow, back to Archive.org: I was glad at the time to be able to take down not only the images, but also all copies at Archive.org, just to prevent any potential repeat of the idiocy. At the same time, this is a shame, as it means that Archive.org ails to be a true archive. It ought to show what was available at any particular point in time, regardless of later changes.
Search for "getty images extortion" - they apparently play this game a lot. They also continue to buy other, smaller image sites - it's increasingly difficult to avoid them.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.