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Re:Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine? by thesmallestcat on Sunday March 26, 2017 @02:23PM (#13962224)
Google's crawlers don't exactly perform 2FA before they crawl a website. If impersonating Google's crawlers doesn't suit your fancy, there are all manner of ways to anonymize a crawler. So I think blocking is one of the least interesting challenges. The other side of the coin is robots.txt is not inherently adversarial, and a crawler could waste quite some time and energy crawling truly meaningless content. That, in my mind, is the interesting challenge: Obsoleting robots.txt with an intelligent (and gentle) crawler.
Re:Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine? by desdiv on Sunday March 26, 2017 @03:03PM (#13962475)
Google doesn't feel like being impersonated so they offer an easy way to authenticate Googlebot:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en