Should Archive.org Ignore Robots.txt Directives And Cache Everything? (archive.org)

Archive.org argues robots.txt files are geared toward search engines, and now plans instead to represent the web "as it really was, and is, from a user's perspective." We have also seen an upsurge of the use of robots.txt files to remove entire domains from search engines when they transition from a live web site into a parked domain, which has historically also removed the entire domain from view in the Wayback Machine... We receive inquiries and complaints on these "disappeared" sites almost daily."
In response, Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein writes: We can stipulate at the outset that the venerable Internet Archive and its associated systems like Wayback Machine have done a lot of good for many years -- for example by providing chronological archives of websites who have chosen to participate in their efforts. But now, it appears that the Internet Archive has joined the dark side of the Internet, by announcing that they will no longer honor the access control requests of any websites.
He's wondering what will happen when "a flood of other players decide that they must emulate the Internet Archive's dismal reasoning to remain competitive," adding that if sys-admins start blocking spiders with web server configuration directives, other unrelated sites could become "collateral damage."

But BoingBoing is calling it "an excellent decision... a splendid reminder that nothing published on the web is ever meaningfully private, and will always go on your permanent record." So what do Slashdot's readers think? Should Archive.org ignore robots.txt directives and cache everything?

Comments

yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah!

Re:yeah

[ArmoredDragon]

Law of headlines indeed, and there's already an established way for web developers to indicate that they don't want content cached or archived while still being searchable:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

So archive.org could just honor that, and the problem would be solved. Google honors exactly this.

Re:yeah

[Zocalo]

Even more specific robots.txt directive for this instance:

User Agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

As is often the case, Lauren is going off half-cocked with only part of the story. The IA already has a policy for removal requests (email info@) and is only considering expanding their current position of ignoring robots.txt on sites outside their current "test zone" of the .gov and .mil gTLD domains and have not had any problems. They probably will do that (and for their archival purposes it's a good idea in principle), but I think it's only fair to see whether or not they listen to the feedback and provide some specific opt-out policy and technical mechanisms like at least honoring either of the above prior to going live on the rest of the Internet before starting to scream and shout. It's going to be a two-way street anyway because they're going to find a lot more sites that feed multiple-MB of pseudo-random crap to spiders that ignore robots.txt to try and do things like poison spammer's address lists, so it's actually in their best interests to provide an opt-out they honor.

Besides, it's going to be interesting to see what kind of idiotic crap web admins who should know better think is safely hidden and/or secured because of robots.txt - it's useful to know who is particularly clueless so you can avoid them at all costs. :)

Re:yeah

[Zocalo]

IA does still spider, but they seem to use a more nuanced system than the rudimentary "start at /, then recursively follow every link" approach used by more trivial site spider algorithms. Firstly, they don't download an entire site in one go - they spread things out over time to avoid putting large spikes into the traffic pattern which is more friendly for sites that are bandwidth limited and on things like "xGB/month" plans. Secondly, they have a "popularity weighting" system that governs the order they spider and refresh sections of a given site, which is the main reason for the difference between the level of content for popular and less popular sites - although I have no idea whether that's based entirely off something like the site's Alexa ranking or is also weighted against how dynamic the content is (e.g a highly dynamic site like Slashdot would get a bump up the priority, whereas a mostly static reference site might get downgraded). Combine the two approaches and you get the results you are seeing: major web homepages get spidered more or less every day with several levels of links retrieved, while some random personal blog only get spidered every few weeks or more, and only with the homepage and first level or two of links ever getting looked at.

No brainer

[fnj]

Duh. Naturally it should. The notion that robots.txt should operate RETROACTIVELY is asinine.

Re:No brainer

[thsths]

But that is not the question asked, is it?

robots.txt should apply to the page at the time. I do not see any decent argument against that.

But arguable robots.txt should not be a way to retroactively mark previously archived content as inaccessible.

Re:No brainer

[blackest_k]

One problem i run into is with owner manuals for old film camera's a lot of the time they disappear from the company website when they get taken over by another company. Sometimes archive.org can come to the rescue if I can find where they used to be. Fair enough the new company may only be interested in the digital models and has no interest in the historical product made by the company they acquired but when they make boneheaded choices like erasing the historical information the original company put out for their customers..

Worst still is when a domain name is lapsed and bought by another company who had zero access to the content of the former site they bought a name not a right to control the history of the former site.

The other thing which bugs me is the white washing of old news articles how often that trick gets pulled, I might personally remember an event but find the contemporary records are missing that happens a lot especially in Politics when a past stance becomes embarrassing and then you get told black was white...

At the very least when a website changes hands the new owner should not be able to erase the history of the site under the previous owner.

Re:No brainer

[dissy]

It should be even easier than that.

Archive.org should archive everything, including the robot.txt contents, at each scan.

The content being displayed from the archive.org website itself however could then still honor robots.txt at the time of the scan, purely for "display" purposes.

This way changing robots.txt to block search engines would not delete or hide any previous information.
Also the new information would still be in the archive, even if not displayed due to the current robots.txt directives.

Although it would require more work to do so properly, this would potentially allow for website owners to retroactively "unhide" content in the archive in the past as well.
Proper in this case would require some way to verify the domain owner, but this could likely be as simple as creating another specifically named text file in the websites root path, with content provided by the archive.
That can be as simple as the old school "cookie" data like so many other services use such as Google, or as complex as a standard that allows date ranges specified along with directives.

But in any case, this would preserve copies of the website for future use, such as for when copyright protection expires.
Despite everyone having a differing opinion on just how long "limited time" should be in "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries", no one who wants to be taken seriously can argue that this time of expiration must happen at some point.
Since the vast majority of authors make no considerations to protect our property, that task clearly needs to fall on us to secure.

Re:No brainer

[mrchaotica]

The other thing which bugs me is the white washing of old news articles how often that trick gets pulled, I might personally remember an event but find the contemporary records are missing that happens a lot especially in Politics when a past stance becomes embarrassing and then you get told black was white...

This is the single most important reason there could ever be!

Robots.txt is not only for privacy

[Lorens]

It is also for variable random content. Imagine a service that returns a webpage containing the product (of the multiplication) of two numbers, followed by a list of links to ten other random number pairs you could try. It would take a 1kB page to write, but infinite space to archive *all* the results. For effect, imagine the service generates a video to show a kid how to multiply the two numbers, or drive from one place to another, or whatever use people have have now found for the Internet.

Random generated content

[DrYak]

It is also for variable random content. Imagine a service that returns a webpage containing the product (of the multiplication) of two numbers, followed by a list of links to ten other random number pairs you could try. It would take a 1kB page to write, but infinite space to archive *all* the results

And archive.org already has a correct behaviour for that :
- it wont try to download all infinity of solution in one go (e.g.: generating giga-byte worth of data out of the 1kB Perl/PHP/NodeJS/whatever source)
- instead it will occasionally rescan the page, every few days (more or less frequently, depending on popularity of the links)
It provides a small glimpse of what a user could have seen back then on the website.

By the way, back in the 2000s, this was exactly a popular way to poison SPAM robots spiders who where scanning the web for e-mail addresses.
- Either they honour robots and not scan that or any other sources of e-mail on the site.
- Or they attempt to ignore robots.txt and follow links they aren't authorised to, and end-up siphonning giga-bytes worth bogus e-mails addresses auto-generated by small perl script, which will pollute their base of harvested addresses.

Archive.org's spider might by a tiny bit more susceptible to this kind of things.
Bot as much as a SPAM email-harvesting spider (which will try to download as much as possible, much more aggressively than archive.org), but still such a labyrinth of links might get archive lost.

No.

[Gravis Zero]

A public act by an organization ignoring robots.txt will only lead to the justification of other organizations ignoring robots.txt. Effectively ignoring it erodes the value of robots.txt. Sure, some underhanded people will ignore it but I don't see organizations openly ignoring it.

If you have an example of an organization completely ignoring robots.txt, do tell.

Re:No.

[dwywit]

robots.txt is a polite way of saying "please don't"

But your website is there for the world to see. If someone, anyone chooses to ignore your polite request, well, so what? Why did you put your content up there for the world to see?

Here is my clever idea...

[Snard]

Maybe there can be a separate directive/section added inside robots.txt that gives direction to sites like archive.org on these matters. So both search engines and archival systems can behave honorably. If someone really does not want their site archived for the ages, archive.org should clearly respect that.

Re:Here is my clever idea...

[blind biker]

Then why even have a website visible on the internet, if you don't want it searchable and archivable? Those two effectively mean "invisible" - because as long as it is visible, it is also archivable - if nothing else, manually.

YES!!

[Vadim Makarov]

I applaud the direction internet archive takes. They should fully implement it.

A year ago one of my domain names was stolen, through negligence of the registrar. The site was a non-profit resource that I maintained for the past 15 years. The squatter who now owns the name put deny all in robots.txt. As the result the website with some quantity of useful information has totally disappeared from existence and from the archive record.

I do not see sufficiently important reasons to remove information that was once in public access. There are some reasons, however the public benefits of having access to all past public information outweigh all them.

This will have some big negative concequences

[jonwil]

Think about a big site like github.com.
Imagine how many terabytes of pretty-printed source code and other things archive.org would be pulling were it to crawl all of GitHub.
And that's just one site, there are many others that generate pretty-printed source code and other large things.

Or what about if it crawls Google and starts archiving all sorts of Google search URLs or Google maps URLs or whatever.

No.

[Megane]

robots.txt is intended to indicate what parts of a site should not be scanned recursively, often due for technical reasons such as generated content> It especially for sub-paths like /cgi-bin/, but there is no technical reason why the content of any arbitrary URL can't be programmatically generated. It might be and you wouldn't even know it, because the generated content may be the same most of the time, such as a navigation menu.

However, it was also not intended to be used to remove previously-archived content, as archive.org is currently using it. When an archived page changes status in robots.txt, they should note the first date that the status changed, then simply stop updating it until and if robots.txt re-allows it.

scanning and archiving are two different operations, and robots.txt is only intended to apply to the former.

Simple solution?

[RDW]

How about this: respect the version of robots.txt that was on the site AT THE TIME OF ARCHIVING. Do not apply subsequent versions of robots.txt to old snapshots retroactively (as when a domain changes ownership), but allow the owner to request deletion when an appropriate robots.txt was omitted by mistake.