I didn't say anything about Google's value prop. My point is, whatever their value prop is, it's built on top of their ability to crawl the web at mass scale, and very quickly. So anybody who wants to compete with Google, by being better at "ranking pages, removing spam, personalizing it to the viewer," or whatever, will need to be able to do crawl in a similar manner. IOW, crawling is part of the "price of admission".
Yes, but I think the comment you responded to were saying that it is an insignificant part these days.
Maybe so. In which case, I'd say I disagree. Great crawling ability is definitely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for building a competitive search engine. And while the technical aspects of building a large scale search engine have been at least partly trivialized by OSS crawling software, elastic computing resources in the cloud, etc., what is at issue is the possibility of site owners blocking anybody who isn't (Google|Bing|Baidu|etc).
In this context, that's my concern: being blocked from crawling, if you're not already on the "allowed" list. Hence my reference to the question quoted above, from TFA.
In one aspect, it was literally their beginning, from which they were able to build a business and expand.
In another, much more on point aspect, it underlies the majority of their services, either directly of a few steps removed.
Like the foundation of a house, it may not always be the most visible aspect, and it may be taken for granted, but its contribution to the integrity of the whole can't be underestimated.
No, I don't. I didn't say anything even remotely like that. What I'm saying is that crawling is a prerequisite for all of the "... best treatment of that data to serve ads, personalise experience ..." stuff. That's why this topic matters: because if people aren't allowed to crawl (or can't do it effectively for technical reasons, but that's a subtly different issue), then they can't do anything else.
Just to be clear, I am most emphatically not saying that just building a crawler is enough to compete with Google. What I'm saying is that you can't build a competitive search engine without that "0.05%" bit because it's required to enable the other 99.95%.
Another possible approach is for sites to be self-indexing, with sharable indices, and validation (and penalties) for deceptive practices (either false term inclusion or exclusion).
The simple existence of a websearch and index protocol would wipe virtually all of Google's present value.
Both models are fairly isomorphic, modulo the crawl / search locus. The key is on agreed data structures, practices, and access.
I came here to state just this. What would code for the crawler in the article do that premade DDoS bots don't already do? (already does that task better too) Even in 2012 when the article was published, there were plenty of open source crawlers AND tools designed specifically for "burdening websites with traffic" that were available.
User-agent: google
Allow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Edit: In my scanning, I have to confess that wikipedia's robot file is the best. Fairly heavily commented on why the rules are there. https://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt
The only problem is: nobody would care, people will still use Google because it's all they know. Some people even ignore the fact that underneath they use an operating system and a browser.
Given that there are plenty of existing, open-source crawling engines out there, I don't see how this decision is really accomplishing anything. Concretely, Apache Nutch[1] can crawl at "web scale" and is apparently the crawler used by Common Crawl.
There’s a more general issue here, which is this: who gets to crawl the web?
This, to me, is the most interesting issue raised by this article. In principle, there's no particular reason that, say, Google, has to dominate search. If somebody clever comes up with a better ranking algorithm, or some other cool innovation, they should be able to knock Google off their perch the same way Google displaced Altavista. BUT... that's only true if anybody can crawl the web in the first place... OR something like Common Crawl reaches parity with the Google's of the world, in both volume and frequency of crawled data.
The first scenario is definitely questionable. Sure, you can plug the Googlebot user agent string into your crawler, but plenty of sites are smart enough to look at other factors and will reject your requests anyway. (I know, I used to work for a company that specialized in blocking bots, crawlers, etc.)
It really is a bit of a catch-22. Site owners legitimately want to keep bad crawlers/bots from A. consuming excessive resources, and B. stealing content, from their sites. But too much of this will lock us into a search oligopoly that isn't good for anybody (except maybe Google shareholders).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Nutch