this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
194 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
59151 readers
3554 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They do that to let search engines index their articles. Then they switch on the paywall an hour later or so but still get a lot of traffic (which is good for advertising) when people click on the link on Google etc.
The crawler identifies itself as a "robot" which can get past the paywall. When you browse using Chrome the site behaves differently. That's why it's so easy to get past by pasting the link into archive.ph
Or by using a browser addon that changes the way the browser identifies itself to pretend it's a search engine crawler.