this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago (6 children)

from the article:

Robots.txt is a line of code that publishers can put into a website that, while not legally binding in any way, is supposed to signal to scraper bots that they cannot take that website’s data.

i do understand that robots.txt is a very minor part of the article, but i think that’s a pretty rough explanation of robots.txt

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Out of curiosity, how would you word it?

[–] ma1w4re@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

List of files/pages that a website owner doesn't want bots to crawl. Or something like that.

[–] NiHaDuncan@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Websites actually just list broad areas, as listing every file/page would be far too verbose for many websites and impossible for any website that has dynamic/user-generated content.

You can view examples by going to most any websites base-url and then adding /robots.txt to the end of it.

For example www.google.com/robots.txt

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